• Search Engine Land, Wednesday, November 21, 2007 11:30 AM

U.S. Senators Herb Kohl and Orrin Hatch sent a public letter to the Federal Trade Commission urging the organization to carefully review the Google-DoubleClick merger. Nobody would disagree that the matter deserves careful review, but it's troubling that the letter "gets a lot of things wrong," illustrating once again that some (or many) Congressman just don't get this tech stuff.

Lost amidst the hype that Google is a "search company" looking to move into the display market is the fact that Google isn't merely a search or contextual company. Google sells display ads. It also sells contextual and video ads. Everything in Google's quarterly earnings either falls under the "search" or "contextual" window. The FTC should ask Google to parse its earnings for the sake of greater transparency.

Moreover, Sullivan reminds us that DoubleClick doesn't actually sell ads. It's not an ad network, it's really a technology vendor. How many times do we have to hear DoubleClick say publishers own their data--it doesn't belong to a network, although networks happen to be some of their customers. As for concerns about the merger creating a monopoly, did everyone miss Microsoft's $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive? What about AOL buying Tacoda? Competition appears to be more robust now than it ever was.

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