Well, who’s surprised that Telecom has offered to completely split off the Access portion of the company into a completely new company totally separate and independent of Telecom itself? :-) Even I hinted at it.

Its funny how monopoly based companies think. After a while you get a feel for how they work and the way they do things. Take Microsoft for example…

Microsoft, a veteran defendant of epic antitrust battles in the United States and Europe, is urging regulators to consider scuttling Google’s plan to buy DoubleClick, an online advertising company.

Microsoft contends that the $3.1 billion deal, announced on Friday, would hurt competition in the fast-growing market for advertising on the Web and raises questions about how much personal information would be collected by Google, already a dominant player in online advertising.

Microsoft Urges Review of Google-DoubleClick Deal – New York Times

So Microsoft loses out and then decides to start beating on the Anti-Trust drum because Google and DoubleClick are (arguably) the two largest online advertising companies. I don’t deny they’re both very large, but Overture was almost as large as DoubleClick when Yahoo! bought them. What makes all this really ironic is that Yahoo!, Microsoft and Time Warner were also all bidding on buying DoubleClick but lost to the Google bid.

Microsoft is very much showing its true colours here. Whats interesting though is that they’re making big noises about the “privacy” issues involved here.

Funny, coming from the company who’s latest flagship operating system is responsible for removing more rights from the end user than any other platform in the history of personal computing. Privacy being the least of them.

I digress however.

Part of an anti-trust investigation looks at how difficult it is for a new company to enter the market. In the case of advertising, there is nothing at all stopping you or I or anyone else from starting a new marketing company and selling advertising. If you can develop the platform, and you can build it in such a way that people will be attracted to it, then nothing is to stop you from entering the market.

Another aspect of any anti-trust investigation is whether a merged company makes it difficult for people to buy that service from a competitor. So for example, if Google and DoubleClick get the go-ahead, how difficult will it be for me to start using Yahoo! Overture, or Microsoft adCenter, or Kanoodle, adBrite or any number of other possible choices out there. To put it mildly, the only thing stopping it is the policies of those other companies.

Google has gotten such a massive ad network because of the low barrier of entry. There are no minimum page views your site must achieve to be able to use their services. The adSense service is available right across Europe, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and a huge part of the Asian markets. Others are very limited in who they will accept as publishers on to their network.

For example, the Yahoo! Publisher Network (Y!PN) makes it very clear that if you want to be a part of the Publisher Network…

you are a US-based business and you are operating Your Site and/or Your RSS Feed solely for viewing and use by users within the US

Y!PN Terms and Conditions – Section 9g

Microsoft’s adCenter is by invitation only. :-/

Google on the other hand, by opening up their AdSense network to so many sites created a huge market for them to sell their AdWords platform with. Sure, the advertising on the search results is the biggest money earner, but its cheaper for me to personally target the content network instead of the search results. I not only get a significantly larger audience, I don’t have to compete as much on price, and thus am able to reduce my advertising expenses.

Because of the size limitations imposed by Microsoft and Yahoo!, I can’t achieve that kind of distribution on their network.

So I put it to you. Is it truly anti-competitive of Google to buy DoubleClick and provide me, the advertiser, more options by expanding the market available to me? Or should I put up with Yahoo! and Microsoft’s small, closed off networks that target only a very small fraction of the audience I can reach through Google’s AdSense network?

Hmmm… Tough choice.