By Hannah Ringheim
There’s an investigation currently going on in the Justice Department of the new advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo. This partnership has a consistent growing resentment due to the frighteningly increasing power of Google, and by having these two powerful players establish a partnership, the business will continue to expand. One way this growing power makes many industries fearful is the concerns of rising prices of advertising; if two of the most powerful and popular corporations for search ads join together, they could easily raise prices for industries to keep their advertising on their search engines.
Numerous industries and groups worldwide (including Canada and countries in Europe) have asked the Justice Department to block the deal from occurring, and other industry groups have criticized the deal immensely. The Justice Department final review still has yet to come out (it’s due by the end of the month), but in the meantime, many individuals believe this agreement will put the company on a course to more frequent run-ins with government regulators, which could slow the government’s ability to innovate. Another industry that has lobbied tremendously against this partnership has been Microsoft, and Microsoft has raised antitrust questions.
Google and Yahoo are vigorously defending this deal due to the benefits it would give users and advertisers. They plan to place ads sold by Google onto Yahoo search queries, thus making Yahoo more active and safe. One of the statistics given by the article states that Google was 62% of searches in the United States alone in July of this year, and Yahoo had a 20.5% share.
Overall, the more important question is how will consumers react with this partnership of the two largest search engines in the world? How will the advertising media be affected, and how will the dominance of internet searches continue to affect our lives?
3 Comments
October 6, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I think this would be a great idea. It would basically help everyone involved, especially the users. We would be able to retain more sources and more information, while the big media heads get what they want, more consumers of their product, more advertising, and more money. Yes, they are the two most powerful search engines and bringing them together could be catastrophic, especially for those minute search engines that want their name out, they might have more difficulty. Other than that, I don’t see too much harm.
October 7, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I think people today can label Google as a monopoly. It seems to be the internet walmart. With the expansion of google through yahoo, it will be undoubtable the most biggest search engine. It will be very convinient to have yahoo and google linked together for users, but it is also very scary for advertisers becuase google has such a big influence in advertizing online. Soon enough, google will come out with their own brand of phones so you can search their search engine even faster. Oh wait…
October 13, 2008 at 11:42 pm
since this agreement is not a business merger, it should not be considered a monopoly. the 2 companies will still remain separate from each other and not share revenue, so this situation would not be considered a monopoly. yet, it is possible that with this agreement, the value of advertising on the sites and internet in general would gain value. Yet this is the simple principles of supply and demand affecting the market, and is inevitable regardless if Google and Yahoo do reach an agreement.