Google Considered a Monopoly?
When Google pulled out of it’s potential advertising agreement with Yahoo! in early November I thought something else was going on. The deal made sense for both parties, Yahoo! has the traffic and Google wanted to supply ads to those site visitors. For Yahoo! it set them up well and could have helped them avoid a proposed Microsoft deal as well.
Turns out, a very real threat from the Department of Justice forced Google to back down. According to Am Law Daily, they were literally hours away from the DOJ filing an antitrust charge specifically calling out Google as a monopoly within the online advertising space.
I love Google in a lot of ways and the deal seemed to make sense. Would it have been a monopoly? Probably to a certain extent, at least within the search advertising marketplace. But what surprises me is that Google was unable to throw their weight around and was the first to blink in the game of chicken with the DOJ.
I really feel like Yahoo! has had a tough year without much reason. They are really doing an amazing job with their audience building. Yahoo! Sports is outpacing ESPN, that alone is quite a valuable piece of business. They have no debt and significant money in the bank, quite a few interesting products, and 2009 could be interesting as they roll out their new ad serving platform on publisher sites (including newspaper sites).
I hope things turn around in 2009 for Yahoo! and a new CEO can breath life into it’s very deflated sails. As for Google being a monopoly, I would rather see that then Yahoo! getting purchased by AOL or Microsoft.
