Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Maureen O'Gara, Kevin Benedict, Greg Ness, Ranko Mosic, John Cowan

Related Topics: Cloud Expo, SOA & WOA, .NET, Search, Open Web

Cloud Expo: Article

DOJ Takes Credit for Shooting Down Yahoogle Deal

The Justice Department made it crystal clear this morning that they would have found themselves in court

The Justice Department made it crystal clear this morning that if Google hadn’t abandoned its controversial ad deal with Yahoo the companies would have found themselves in court.

The agency put out a statement from the head of its antitrust unit Thomas Barnett saying that Yahoo and Google “abandoned their advertising agreement after the Department of Justice informed the companies that it would file an antitrust lawsuit to block the implementation of the agreement.”

And he explained why the agency had decided to sue: “If implemented, the agreement between these two companies accounting for 90% or more of each relevant market would likely harm competition in the markets for Internet search advertising and Internet search syndication.

Barnett also said that “The arrangement likely would have denied consumers the benefits of competition – lower prices, better service and greater innovation.”

After months of investigation, he said the DOJ “concluded that Google and Yahoo! would have become collaborators rather than competitors for a significant portion of their search advertising businesses, materially reducing important competitive rivalry between the two companies. Although the companies proposed various modifications to their original agreement in an effort to address the Department’s antitrust concerns, the Department determined that such modifications would not eliminate the competition concerns raised by the agreement.”

The investigation ultimately included the Canadian Competition Bureau and attorneys general from 15 states including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Texas, Wisconsin and Washington.

The DOJ imagines that if the deal went through Yahoo’s competition to Google “likely would have been blunted immediately with respect to the search pages that Yahoo chose to fill with ads sold by Google rather than its own ads, and Yahoo would have had significantly reduced incentives to invest in areas of its search advertising business where outsourcing ads to Google made financial sense for Yahoo.”

More Stories By Maureen O'Sullivan

Maureen O'Sullivan is a UK-based lecturer
in Law (Property and New Technologies), University of West of England, and President of the Free Software
Consortium Foundation. She is coordinator of the Cyber Tribunal and Legal Governing
Body, FSC.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Cloud Expo Breaking News
Wide and cheap availability of cloud-based media services is upon us. With the transformations these services are already bringing to the consumption of music, video and interactive media, change has likewise come to professional workflows. Documents in 2012 are read, written, collaborated on, and distributed anywhere an Internet-enabled device can reach – which is to say, everywhere. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Christopher Kenneally, Director of Business Development a...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
Cloud is a shift from the focus on underlying technology implementation to leveraging existing implementations and further building upon them. Cloud orchestration or a network of clouds is the wave of the future where these clouds can operate with elasticity, scalability, and efficiency. Effective service management is an important aspect of managing such networks. The transition to the cloud will enable the further aggregation of composite web services and enhanced business-to-business capabili...
CONGRATULATIONS to National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) CIO Jill T. Singer for being selected as one of the 10 winners of the first annual CloudNOW awards presented in Santa Clara, California earlier this week.

From the NRO Press Release:
"Considered one of the top women leaders in Federal IT, Ms. Singer was recognized for her innova...
I've been working on Enterprise Cloud Strategy and in the course of this work identified some interesting and non-obvious opportunities in the Cloud. One solution I’ve examined is the well-crafted solution that is enStratus. enStratus has built a SaaS Cloud Management / Governance product focused on providing critical management, monitoring, governance capabilities tailored to the needs of the Global 2000 market, rather than the startup market. As I have worked with a current Fortune 500 clie...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
"Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it," said National Reconaissance Office (NRO) Chief Information Officer Jill T. Singer Tuesday, as it was announced that she was one of 10 winners of the 2012 CloudNOW "Top Ten Women in Cloud" Awards.
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...