…against the DoubleClick purchase. Yahoo bought online advertising firm Right Media. AOL bought German ad-serving firm Adtech AG and Tacoda, which does online behavioural targeting. Microsoft spent $6bn (£3bn) buying advertising firm Aquantive, a DoubleClick rival, and online advertising exchange AdECN Inc.
Chairing Thursday's hearing will be Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat with a personal net worth of about a quarter-billion dollars whose family made its fortune with the Kohl's department store chain.
Kohl can be more free-market than most Democrats on taxation, but tends to be regulatory when it comes to antitrust topics. He strongly opposed the merger of XM and Sirius Satellite Radio and said in 2001 that "vigorous application of well-established antitrust laws" would stabilise prices in the oil industry.
Privacy concerns
Kohl has indicated that privacy concerns — DoubleClick has long been a bête noire of privacy organisations — would be part of the hearing, and has invited Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center to testify.
EPIC and two other liberal groups opposed Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, telling the FTC that "the proposed acquisition will create unique risks to privacy" to "more than 1.1 billion internet users around the world".
"Privacy has been integral to the FTC's reviews of online advertising in the past, and it should be to its review of the Google-DoubleClick merger," Rotenberg said on Wednesday evening. "I think we have a very solid case. It's solid in two different respects. First, it relies on the FTC's precedent. Second, it's based on very detailed filings we've made with the FTC about Google and DoubleClick's business practices. I think the FTC will either block or modify the deal."
For its part, Google has described its DoubleClick purchase as a way to protect privacy. In Drummond's written testimony, he says that Google will include an opt-out mechanism prohibiting advertising cookies from being placed on their computer and extend its current partial-anonymisation policy to apply to wiping DoubleClick log data after 18 months.
"We make privacy a priority because our business depends on it," Drummond wrote. "If our users are uncomfortable with how we manage the information they provide to us, they are only one click away from switching to a competitor's services. If you don't believe me, recall that before Google, users clicked on an earlier generation of search engines like Excite, Altavista, Lycos, and Infoseek — each extremely popular in its time."
CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh is married to a Google employee.
