DoubleClick

Given that Google began offering online personal health records to the public yesterday, I thought it would be timely and helpful to repost in its entirety a previous post of mine from February 21, 2008 on why Google being in the business of storing personal health records is a really bad joke.

• The post has over twenty useful and illuminating links, and many of them contain mainstream documents that underscore why the public should be extremely wary about entrusting Google with its most intimate, private and personal information.

Below is my 2-21-2008 post in its entirety -- if you missed it, or care about this issue, it's a online privacy must-read post: 

AP reports "Google to Store Patient's Health Records." Let's count the reasons why Google storing Americans' private health records is a really bad joke.

Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman "Monday called on Google to remove Internet video content produced by terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda. The videos – readily available on YouTube –show assassinations, deaths of U.S. soldiers and civilians, weapons training, incendiary speeches by al-Qaeda leadership, and other material intended to encourage violence against the West."

• This link includes the Chairman's press release and the Committee's Monday letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
  • (An interesting historical sub-text to this letter, that is worth mentioning, is that in 2000, Senator Lieberman was the Vice Presidential running mate of current Google Senior Advisor Al Gore, a former Vice President of the U.S.)

I link to this Senator Lieberman announcement because it will be telling how Google responds to this reasonable request from Homeland Security oversight authorities, given that Google is the funding patron and well recognized corporate leader of the "net neutrality" movement that has branded net neutrality as the "First Amendment of the Internet." (Never mind that the Internet has never had a constitution to amend.)

The new 2008 Internet Advertising Revenue report just came out from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

It has U.S. Internet advertising revenues for 2007 at $21.2b, up an impressive 26% from 2006 revenues of $16.9b, but nowhere near as impressive as Google's 56% overall revenue growth in 2007. 

With the pending Google-Yahoo outsourcing pact reportedly being negotiated, I thought it might be iluminating or instructive to see what share of U.S. Internet advertising revenues Google and Yahoo each have, and what they would have on a combined basis. 

• Given that Google's 2007 U.S. revenues were ~$8.9b that would be about 42% of all U.S. advertising of $21.2b.
• Given that Yahoo's 2007 U.S. revenues were ~$4.7b that would be about 22% of all U.S. advertising revenues of $21.2b.
• That would put Google and Yahoo's combined Internet advertising revenue shares at 64% that the "partnership" would collectively control. 

At a minimum, the domination of these two players in the U.S. Internet advertising market, combined with Google's incredible momentum in taking share from all its competitors signalling powerful network effects, must concern both the DOJ and FTC.

If Google and Yahoo partner to not compete as fully as they did before... where is competition going to come from? 

With respect and affection to the memory of the late great Dr. Seuss.... 

Googlehoo mocks all the boo hoos over their ballyhooed Googlehoo coup.

Get a clue.

Googlehoo pooh-poohs a collusive coup between their crews.

It's no glue to screw you.

But, who knew it would be true, that Googlehoo would rue, that Justice could see through, Googlehoo's collusion boo-boo, and eventually sue?

Can we construe Mr. Icahn's Yahoo debut, and shareholder kung fu, as a rejection of the Googlehoo view?

Will Yahoo bid Googlehoo adieu, overcome the Microsoft taboo, and renew the review of the Microsoft view?

As Google and Yahoo continue to negotiate their search outsourcing pact, pesky competitive facts keep arising that suggest that such a deal is likely to eventually be found by antitrust officials to be illegal anti-competitive collusion.

• Yahoo is running an AP story that says that Google has now surpassed Yahoo as the #1 "most popular website in the United States according to Comscore."
• This is on top of Google and Yahoo being the #1 and #2 search providers in the U.S. and the leading competitors in the display advertising market, ad tools market and ad brokering market.

The operative question is not whether Google and Yahoo can craft an acceptable search advertising outsourcing pact that can pass antitrust muster, but whether the DOJ wants to encourage such intimate  and important business "cooperation" between Google, the dominant #1 in the market, and one of the only two companies that most consider to be Google's primary competition in multiple market segments.

A Silicon Insider post does a great job of building on Richard Waters FT point that Google's search business is increasingly rivaling the size of Microsoft's Windows monopoly.

It is getting harder and harder for Google to continue to pretend to be the little vulnerable upstart -- Google is now the dominant incumbent in search and increasingly the market power in online advertising.

The numbers in Silicon Insider's analysis are quite compelling.  

Kudos to Richard Waters of FT for his insightful analysis "Google triumphant."

Let me highlight some key takeaways:

• “The failure of the Microsoft/Yahoo merger eliminates the biggest short-term threat” to Google’s unrivalled position on the web, says David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. For now, its momentum “seems unstoppable”.

The article also provides excellent new detail to the thesis in my Googleopoly analysis and Senate testimony that Google's real dominance is as the dominant "market maker" for online advertising.

The American Consumer Intstitute just put out a good consumergram on: the DOJ investigation of the Google-Yahoo deal and asks if the search market has reached a tipping point.

• The ACI consumergram is asking the right questions.
• More entities should be, and will be, asking these types of questions going forward because the facts and Google's behavior will demand it.

As I explained in detail in my Googleopoly analysis, the search market has already tipped to Google and the Google-DoubleClick merger was a tipping point to enable Google to extend its market power in search advertising to display and online advertising as well.

As I explained the stakes of lax antitrust enforcement in my Senate Judiciary testimony:

"The Stakes of Lax Antitrust Enforcement: Will Google be enabled to become the:

• “Online-advertising bottleneck provider” picking Internet content winners and losers?

Found a smoking gun on how Google's conflict of interests actually hurts Google users, which I explain later in this post.

• As I have blogged several times of late, here, here, here, here, and here, Google works for advertisers and publishers not users/consumers; and Google's undisclosed conflict of interest, lulls Google's users into a false sense of security that Google is looking out for users' best interests -- and safety -- when they clearly are not.
• I have found specific evidence below that Google is not looking out for its users' best interests or safety. 

Google knows there are "potentially harmful sites that make Google users more vulnerable to spammers or scammers. I have suggested before that they could easily warn users of the danger from specific results with warnings on search result pages.

A Yahoo-Google search outsourcing pact arguably faces even more problems with European antitrust authorities than the reported U.S. DOJ antitrust investigation, for two reasons: