Information Society Watch

December 19, 2007, Indiatimes Infotech

The proposed Google-DoubleClick deal, in which Google Inc. intends to take over online adtracker DoubleClick, is now being examined by regulators from two angles. The first is the anti-trust point and the other is related to data privacy. One concern is that the combination of two dominant forces will ultimately distort the Internet advertising space and thus negatively affect consumers. Another important aspect to the deal are the data privacy issues, which have become paramount in recent years. In a nutshell, regulators need to carefully analyse such mergers in order to preserve competition and personal data sanctity, so that individual consumers are not compromised by companies gaining access to such information.

Read full text