• by Seana Mulcahy , April 16, 2007

In my typical frenetic Friday hoop-jumping I stopped in my tracks. Within a matter of a few minutes I had 32 email alerts and feeds announcing Google's biggest acquisition to date -- a whopping $3.1 billion dollars for none other than DoubleClick.

I had heard rumors recently that Microsoft was the suitor -- and whammo, in comes Google. Make sense both giants would fight over DoubleClick. Google's been trying to get into the display ad space. So think about it, now Google has access to reams of ad campaign data and instant tenured relationships with advertisers and Web publishers at large. Keeping Microsoft away from DoubleClick seems to be the biggest coup for Google.

My first reaction was, holy crap. Then within moments slews of colleagues shared the same sentiment. I had to take a step back to digest this news. While I'm a huge fan of Google on a personal and a professional level, it also scares me.

When I use Gmail for personal email I think all this personal stuff is being archived someplace. When you use Google image search, it is not uncommon to land on pictures of babies and kids. For instance, I was helping my little cousin with a school project. We needed to find a picture of a giraffe. When we typed in "giraffe" we landed on a whole host of baby pictures with giraffe in the label. I wouldn't want to give just anyone on the Web at large the ability to see pictures of my child. Creepy.

If Google has archives of countless number of search terms, Gmail data, photos and images, maps and locations and now ad campaign data... that doesn't leave much out. It seems a little Big Brother to me. Just think about it, Google will know just about everything. It's funny, I remember DoubleClick getting loads of bad press and scrutiny for this many years ago. Is this now okay?

The biggest question to me is, do you think this is a conflict of interest? Will Google use DoubleClick's relationships to build its own network? If so, what will publishers do? A few weeks ago or so DoubleClick's CEO David Rosenblatt announced the development of a new Nasdaq-like exchange for online ads. It is a platform for bringing Web publishers and media buyers together on a Web site where they can take part in auctions for ad space. Rosenblatt said this would most likely be DoubleClick's money-maker within 5 years.

Well it seems Microsoft has quickly begun to urge antitrust officials to squash the deal. Micorosoft clearly contends that this acquisition would hurt competition for online Web ads. The company also questions Google's methods of collecting users' personal information.

Will everyone now rely on Google to increase ad revenue and traffic? Well, according to Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and president for technology, "It has been our vision to make Internet advertising better -- less intrusive, more effective, and more useful." This writer says "amen" to that. But it's the "intrusive" part that still has me squeamish. Thoughts?