• by Mitch Oscar , Op-Ed Contributor, May 8, 2007

Since everyone is offering an opinion about Google's pending acquisition of DoubleClick and voicing privacy concerns about the company's massive amount of aggregated private data pertaining to user online behavior that could be linked to Google's reams of search data to generate detailed profile of individuals, I thought that I would chime in, adding another voice to the cacophonous bandwagon and raise a question from the televisual realm. To date, Microsoft, AT&T, Yahoo, and advertising agency holding company WPP are prodding the federal government to investigate the deal. What I want to know is: where do the cable systems operators, particularly Comcast and Time Warner, stand on the merge? Although Time Warner has thrown its hat in the ring on the side of the anti-trusters, it has done so very quietly -- perhaps because Google owns a billion-dollar stake in Time Warner's Internet access service/portal AOL; and Comcast's position publicly is nonexistent, to my knowledge.

Historically, all cable systems operators, and for that matter satcasters and telecos with video platforms, are extremely customer-privacy-sensitive. So much so, the government has mandated fines of $500 per day per subscriber for any customer privacy violation that comes to its attention --although the operators are permitted to mine their subscriber data to upsell services. Also, to the detriment of their on-demand platform advertising revenue generation efforts, the cable operators have consistently informed the advertising industry that outside of Nielsen or "fusion" projectable ratings, they will only provide limited subscriber interactive data points, such as unique monthly views, gross monthly views, viewing duration, graphs delineating day of the week and daypart viewing, and request for interaction opt-ins. Unfortunately, the system operators have not backed down in the last four years that the 4A's Advanced TV Committee has been pressuring them to offer more data points. The penalty would be too costly, they reiterate. A far cry from the valuable data that online companies such as Google and DoubleClick are permitted to glean from behavioral activity and the scrutinization of Web search preferences.

So what keeps Comcast mum and the other cable systems operators barely audible on this $3.1 billion transaction? If I were Comcast -- the largest pay TV provider in the U.S. (23.5 million subscription households), and the second largest Internet service provider in the U.S. (12.1 million customers), positioned slightly below AT&T (12.9 million) and marginally ahead of AOL (12 million) -- why would I be non-vocal about Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, when it could presumably lead to an online advertising monopoly? Particularly when I am investing so heavily in the development of a broadband video presence -- i.e., Fancast, Ziddio and Comcast.net -- as well as brokering deals with the likes of NBC Universal and News Corp. as a distributor of their online video content? The only scenario that comes to mind is the possibility that if the Google and DoubleClick deal survives scrutiny, and other display ad services companies are acquired by the likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, AT&T and/or AOL, couldn't Comcast use these mergers and acquisitions as a precedent-setting platform to challenge the stringent TV privacy regulatory issues on mining its subscriber data when it attempts to marry the knowledge that the company gleans from its Web activities with that of its digital cable TV viewing platform, or more meaningfully, its quadruple bypass services -- cable, broadband, telephony and wireless -- in order to deploy more precise addressable and segmentation applications to generate substantially more revenue from advertisers and squash the competition in its area of dominant influence.