Google's DoubleClick Buy to Win Clearance, People Say
Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc.'s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick Inc. will be cleared by U.S. antitrust enforcers as early as this week, two people with knowledge of the decision said. — The five-member Federal Trade Commission …
Context & Ripple Effects
The deal has been in review almost since inception: DoubleClick explored a sale in March 2007, Google laid out its rationale on its own blog in June (Why we're buying DoubleClick), and privacy critics took the merger to the FTC back in April (privacy complaint). Bloomberg now reports, citing two people with knowledge of the decision, that the five-member commission will clear the $3.1 billion purchase as early as this week — a sourced report of imminent clearance, not yet an announced ruling.
The story traveled widely the same day, with CNET's pickup highlighting Google's own defensive framing: the company argued publicly that the Microsoft-Viacom deal strengthens its case that the display-ad market stays contested even after the acquisition.
First-order effects
- If the commission clears the deal this week as sources indicate, Google can proceed to close its $3.1 billion all-cash purchase and begin folding DoubleClick's display-ad serving into its business.
- Privacy groups whose April complaint opened the FTC front lose their primary regulatory venue, leaving the merger's opponents without a US enforcement channel.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft and other rivals that lobbied against the merger are stripped of the antitrust objection they had pressed, forcing them to compete against a combined Google-DoubleClick on product and pricing rather than in Washington.
- Google's cited Microsoft-Viacom tie-up points to a market where content owners and ad platforms pair off, raising the odds of further media-and-advertising combinations as each side seeks scale.
Third-order effects
- Clearance here would set a precedent that US enforcers treat search advertising and third-party display ad-serving as distinct markets, shaping how future ad-tech mergers get judged.
- With antitrust permissive toward ad-market consolidation, organized privacy objections become the recurring brake on large data-and-advertising combinations.
The trend: Online advertising is consolidating around a handful of platforms, with US antitrust review clearing major ad-tech mergers and privacy complaints emerging as the principal countervailing force.