Open Letter To Senators Hatch & Kohl About Google-DoubleClick
Today, US senators Herb Kohl and Orrin Hatch published a letter (PDF) urging the US Federal Trade Commission to carefully consider the proposed Google-DoubleClick deal. Sure, who doesn't agree with a careful review?
Context & Ripple Effects
The Kohl-Hatch letter lands after months of building Washington friction around Google's proposed DoubleClick buy. In April 2007, an advocacy group's privacy complaint against Google reached the FTC, and by June, public-interest coalitions were openly calling for limits on Google's expansion. What had been a regulator-level review is now drawing direct Senate attention.
That escalation matters because it changes the audience for the deal review: the FTC is no longer weighing the merger on its own timetable but under explicit instruction from two senators — one a senior Judiciary Committee figure — to scrutinize what combining the leading search advertiser with a leading display-ad server means for competition and consumer data.
First-order effects
- Google and DoubleClick must now argue their case before a politically sensitized FTC, adding congressional pressure on top of the agency's existing privacy-focused review.
Second-order effects
- Rivals, advertisers, and publishers opposed to the merger gain a ready-made Capitol Hill venue for their objections, raising the cost for Google of any concession it offers during the review.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — complaints, then coalition pressure, then Senate letters — large combinations of search and display advertising assets will face layered scrutiny spanning both antitrust and consumer-data concerns, setting a template regulators apply to future ad-tech consolidation.
The trend: Washington is shifting from reactive privacy complaints toward proactive political scrutiny of online-advertising concentration, with the Google-DoubleClick review as the early test case.