According to an article in the Financial Times today, Google has reneged on a commitment to improve the way it manages consumer data in light of its DoubleClick acquisition. There are compelling reasons for Google's delay, as Eric Schmidt points out in the article, but there are even more compelling concerns that demand immediate action.
European regulators cut Google some slack based on its word that it was going to immediately look into ways to boost privacy. A year into that pledge, Google has done little, by its own admission:
The issue came to the fore last April with Google's announced plan to buy DoubleClick, an Internet company which delivers many of the ads consumers see online and which plants many of the cookies that sit on personal computers. The combination of Google's records of a consumer's Internet searches with DoubleClick's information from cookies prompted complaints that one company would hold extensive data about a large proportion of the world's Internet users.
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It's often difficult to find existing or new customers to adopt a new release. Openads, however, is having the opposite problem. With 10,000 publishers jumping onto the latest release of its ad network, the "problem" will be managing its growth:
I am very pleased to announce that, as of yesterday, over 10,000 publishers are using the latest Openads stable release (2.4). In the space of just 3 months we have reached this exciting milestone with publishers upgrading from the older releases and new publishers turning to Openads to manage their online advertising.
Think of Openads as the open-source Doubleclick. Except that it offers real choice for publishers:
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A letter from the top two ranking members of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, Democrat Herb Kohl and Republican Orrin Hatch, seeks to chill Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick on antitrust grounds:
Antitrust regulators need to be wary to guard against the creation of a powerful Internet conglomerate able to extend its market power in one market into adjacent markets, to the detriment of competition and consumers.
This might not have seemed like much of a threat, even a year or two ago, but as the online world increasingly merges with the offline world, the threat becomes more palpable.
My primary concern with the deal isn't about advertising market share, but rather about privacy, as the senators also call out:
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