On Tuesday, the European Commission cleared Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick without conditions. The EC review began six months ago and concluded the transaction is not likely to harm competition for online advertising.

With that approval, on Wednesday Google closed the acquisition of DoubleClick.

The EC reasoned that Google offers free search capabilities and sells advertising through its AdSense network. DoubleClick, by contrast, sells ad serving, management and reporting technology to Web-site publishers and to advertisers and agencies, with a focus on relevant placements.

“The commission’s in-depth market research found that Google and DoubleClick were not exerting major competitive constraints on each other’s activities and could, therefore, not be considered as competitors at the moment,” the EC said. “Even whether DoubleClick could become an effective competitor in online intermediation services, it is likely that other competitors would continue to exert sufficient competitive pressure after the merger.”

Will Google Rule the Roost?

The EC additionally analyzed the potential impacts

of the Google acquisition on competing ad servers. During its exploration, third parties raised concerns that giving Google the potential to control DoubleClick’s tools could put Google in a position to raise costs for rivals.

Competitors plus suggested that Google could require companies purchasing ad space to purchase DoubleClick’s management and reporting tools.

However, the EC decided the merged company would not have the “ability to engage in strategies aimed at marginalizing Google’s competitors, mainly considering of the presence of credible ad-serving alternatives to which customers (publishers/advertisers/ad networks) can switch, in specific vertically integrated companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.”

The EC further found that a Google-DoubleClick merger would have no incentive to close access to competitors in the ad-serving market, mainly considering it wouldn’t be profitable.

Privacy Versus Antitrust

Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, was not surprised that the EC approved the merger. But…

Orginal post by Top Tech News