• San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, October 4, 2007 11:45 AM

Count San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joseph Turow, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, as one of those who's freaked out by the idea of a Google-DoubleClick merger being approved. For one thing, the move to acquire the ad serving giant signals the company's (scary) intent to control all media.

Google's technology has the power to tell us what we'd like to see, based on the massive amount of information it collects. The search giant also has the power (and intention) to sell that information to advertisers. Turow warns that the DoubleClick merger would be a giant step in the direction of making Google "the only place marketers have to go to reach you and just about anybody else."

Kudos to Google for having the foresight to see (and power to influence) how American media and marketing will change. Ad-serving is at the center of that change. Google already dominates one category of ad-serving, search, and now it's out to corner display advertising, too, in addition to extending its reach beyond the Internet and into other media like mobile phones. All in all, the company's "secret weapon" is its user data.

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