Google/DoubleClick Merger To Receive Approval From European Regulators By Next Week: Report
European Commission regulators are prepared to give Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of online advertising firm DoubleClick the go-ahead next week, FT reported, citing an unidentified source.
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal has been cleared obstacle by obstacle for nearly a year. The privacy complaint filed with the FTC in April 2007 framed the merger as a data-combination risk, but that argument failed to stop American regulators: the FTC closed its investigation without blocking terms in December 2007.
Europe was the last holdout, and the battleground was explicitly political — Microsoft mounted what TechCrunch called its 'last stand' at the European Commission against the acquisition. Now the Financial Times reports, citing an unidentified source, that the Commission is prepared to approve within days; the claim is a report of intent rather than a formal decision, which is why it travels as rumor even though it matches Bloomberg's December sourcing.
First-order effects
- Google gets the final regulatory green light on its $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick, removing the last legal barrier to closing a deal already cleared by the FTC in December 2007.
- Microsoft's campaign to kill the deal through European regulators ends in failure, leaving Microsoft with no institutional channel left to contest Google's move into display advertising.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in display advertising — Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL — face a combined search-plus-display powerhouse and must accelerate their own ad-platform consolidation to compete, a pressure already visible in Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo earlier this year.
- Privacy advocates lose the regulator route they used in both Washington and Brussels, pushing their case from antitrust filings toward self-regulatory standards and product-level controls such as the opt-in settings Google introduced in Analytics this week.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are establishing precedent that combining behavioral data across search and display is not itself grounds for blocking a merger — shifting the debate over ad-market concentration away from antitrust authorities and toward privacy law and industry codes.
- Online advertising consolidates structurally around vertically integrated platforms that own the auction, the inventory, and the advertiser relationship, raising entry barriers for independent ad networks and exchanges.
The trend: Antitrust regulators are proving willing to clear large online-advertising mergers on competitive rather than data-privacy grounds, accelerating platform consolidation in digital ads.