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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Overheated
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
But it's when you look beyond advertising, to the broader economic ecosystem that's coming to define the way traffic and money flow through the consumer internet, that the Google-DoubleClick deal becomes more interesting, and troublesome, from an antitrust perspective. Google is not only the dominant player in the ad-serving market (and would see its dominance expand greatly by adding DoubleClick's dominant banner-ad business), but is also the dominant player in the web searching market, controlling somewhere between 48% and 64% of that business (depending on whose data you believe). It has also, through its recent YouTube acquisition, seized a dominant share of the burgeoning market for the delivery of video online. Combined with Google Video, YouTube controls 55% of that market, according to Compete, while its nearest competitor, MySpace, holds just 15%. Google's dominance in all these areas, moreover, seems to be increasing, suggesting that all these markets may have winner-takes-all characteristics.
Here's another, simpler possibility for Nick: maybe they have better products and better marketing. I'll wait while Nick tries to wrap his head around that idea.