The Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission must investigate–and should halt–this acquisition. As the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group told the FTC last November, we are concerned about the growing consolidation of control within the digital advertising technology industry. Now, we have the number one online search advertising “agency”–Google, swallowing up the leading provider of third party display ads online. Google will have even more information about each of us and a vast new array of targeting and profiling technologies to boot. We mention the EU because Google is a global business and Doubleclick acquired Germany-based Falk last year.
The evolving structure of the interactive advertising market will have a tremendous impact on the quality and diversity of content in the emerging digital media worlds. We also most protect ourselves from permitting a handful of giants–such as a Google–to digitally shadow our every move online. But the new deal underscores why its time to protect privacy online in the U.S. There needs to be a series of safeguards to ensure we fully understand and control all our information (and not just the narrowly defined data set of name, email, etc. now acknowledged by industry and regulators). There are other concerns beyond the scope of anti-trust and data privacy regulators. We must think about the consequences to civil society about a interactive world where everything is a precision targeted and profiled-powered commercial transaction.
Expect action from the Center for Digital Democracy.
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