The FTC has voted 4-1 not to block the Google-DoubleClick merger on competition grounds, denying a petition from U.S. PIRG, the Center for Digital Democracy and EPIC. Concurrently, the FTC staff have issued a call for comments on a proposed set of "possible self-regulatory principles" on behavioral advertising. In our view, this merger's tremendous transformative impact on online markets and the well-evidenced privacy harms that the Google-DoubleClick combination create should have resulted, at a minimum, in conditions if not denial. We're also disappointed that the full FTC didn't understand, as dissenting Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour did, that this merger has numerous anti-competitive network effects. We'll read the proposed privacy rules more closely before we comment further. Here is an excerpt from our Center for Digital Democracy colleague Jeff Chester's statement:

By permitting Google to combine
the personal details, gleaned from our searches online and YouTube downloads, with the vast repository of information collected by DoubleClick, the FTC has sanctioned the creation of a new digital data colossus. The FTC is supposed to protect the privacy of Americans in the digital age. The excuse offered by the majority of the commission --that consumer privacy can't be addressed by current antitrust law--reveals a lack of leadership and determination to protect U.S. consumers. It's clear that this merger--and the ones that follow--will be about companies creating the twenty-first-century's equivalent of railroad, steel, and oil monopolies in the past. The FTC was created to protect Americans from the dangers of such monopolies, something the agency failed to do today.