senators on Thursday injected themselves into a high-stakes dispute between Google and Microsoft over whether the search giant's proposed acquisition of display advertising company DoubleClick presents antitrust or privacy concerns.
But after the hearing, which lasted almost two hours, it was still unclear where most of the senators stood. The top Democrat and top Republican on the Senate panel seemed more interested in asking questions than adopting the common congressional tactic of forcefully arguing on behalf of Google or Microsoft.
Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.), the subcommittee's chairman, said at the outset that he would approach the topic with an "open mind," and by the time the hearing ended, that apparently hadn't changed.
"Both sides made very powerful arguments," he told reporters following the proceeding. "What the balance is, myself, I'm not sure."
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the committee's ranking member, was equally hard to read. He repeatedly referred to the online advertising sphere as "very interesting" and said he would have additional questions in writing for fans and foes of the merger.
The lack of political grandstanding meant the bulk of the hearing allowed the well-documented and long-standing rivalry between Microsoft and Google to play out yet again--this time, albeit, in a wood-paneled committee room on Capitol Hill. The companies compete in a wealth of markets, including advertising, search, office applications, instant messaging and mapping.
Seated side by side at a long table facing the mostly empty seats of politicians (it wasn't a lack of interest, Kohl claimed afterward, just a "complicated issue" and a "very busy" day for most of the subcommittee's 11 members), Google chief legal officer David Drummond and Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith outlined a now-familiar set of arguments for and against the estimated $3.1 billion deal announced in April.
In contrast to the lackluster participation from politicians, the public turned out in droves, with scores of men and women in suits forming a line snaking down two hallways. After the limited number of seats rapidly filled up, the committee permitted two rows of people to stand at the back of the room.
Much of the back and forth focused on two major issues: whether Google's acquisition of DoubleClick would diminish competition in the online ad space, potentially raising ad rates, and whether the merger would put Google in possession of massive stores of data on Internet users, thereby posing privacy concerns and stifling other ad companies' abilities to target ads as effectively.
Drummond repeatedly said the deal does not pose antitrust concerns because DoubleClick is not a rival to Google but a complementary business. He said that's primarily because DoubleClick is not in the business of buying and selling ads--rather, it simply provides the tools for displaying them--but Google is. Google's primary motive for purchasing DoubleClick is to strengthen its position in display advertising--that is, serving graphical ads--to supplement its already-dominant position in the text-based advertising market, he said, echoing earlier statements by CEO Eric Schmidt.
Repeatedly making comparisons between his company's proposed merger and Microsoft's $6 billion buyout of Net advertising firm Aquantive, Drummond urged Kohl, who was frequently the only senator present at the hearing, to look at the online advertising space more "holistically."
"We don't have a unique stranglehold on all of the information out on the Internet for online ad purposes," Drummond said. "There are other competitors in this space, (such as) Aquantive, that have the same kind of data."
Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith, for his part, said he sharply disagreed with the assertion that Google and DoubleClick don't compete with each other. He displayed for the committee a poster showing a screenshot of the social-networking site Friendster.com and noted that a single page contained ads delivered both by Google's Adsense network and by DoubleClick.
Google has argued that DoubleClick, with its ad-serving technology, provides the same services to its business that shipping companies such as FedEx or UPS do for Amazon.com. Smith countered by arguing that "Google is already Amazon and is already FedEx, and now they're proposing to buy the post office."
Smith also compared the deal, should it go through, to allowing the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq to combine. "Somebody could build an alternate exchange, but would anybody go there to take their company public?" he asked.
When given a chance to respond, Drummond argued that Smith's statement is "no more true than (the statement that) a company that delivers trucks from, say, the dock to the dealer controls the car or the truck market. It doesn't."
But there were few testy exchanges during the hearing. At one point, Kohl asked Smith whether he was implying that Drummond was not being entirely honest, to which Smith replied, "I'm not going to second-guess his motives," and patted Drummond on the shoulder in a way that suggested he wasn't trying to hurt his rival's feelings.
"We don't have a unique stranglehold on all of the information out on the Internet for online ad purposes. There are other competitors in this space, (such as) Aquantive, that have the same kind of data."
--David Drummond, Google chief legal officer
MORE NEWS...
Microsoft, Google spar over DoubleClick in D.C
.Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick was the subject of a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., today. Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, testified in opposition to the deal. His prepared remarks are available here. The prepared testimony of David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, is here: PDF, 6 pages.
Smith acknowledged that Microsoft isn't a disinterested observer. At the same time, he said the planned acquisition could hurt the market.
From his prepared remarks:
"If Google and DoubleClick are allowed to merge, Google will become the overwhelmingly dominant pipeline for all forms of online advertising. This merger will almost certainly result in higher profits for the operator of the dominant advertising pipeline, but it will be bad for everyone else. It will be bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and most importantly, bad for consumers."
The hearing also dealt with issues of data privacy. In this story, Wired News covers Drummond's live testimony, rebutting Microsoft.
From the story:
Microsoft has some gall saying that a post-DoubleClick purchase, Google will be dominating online ads because of its massive database on users, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond told a panel of senators Thursday.
"Microsoft is the largest purchaser of online ads, an email service with 280 million or so users and a billion in revenues from display ads," Drummond said. "They have a lot more information than Google has."
No comments:
Post a Comment