Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

I can officially announce that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is indeed hard at work seeking to determine if the proposed Google and Yahoo! partnership announced on June 12th will hurt consumers and/ or advertisers. JumpFly was contacted yesterday to arrange a voluntary discussion for today, and I just finished a lengthy discussion with our friends over in the anti-trust department of the DOJ. I cannot comment on any details from this discussion, but can confirm that there is definitely a serious investigation in place.

I personally have mixed feelings about the potential Yahoo!-Google partnership. It may actually prove to benefit advertisers in the end, as both Yahoo! and Google suggest. “This commercial agreement provides Yahoo! with the opportunity to deliver more relevant ads to users and provide advertisers and publishers with better advertising technology to help them succeed in their own businesses,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google. “This agreement will preserve the competitive and dynamic online advertising space.”

Gaining access to Yahoo!’s search traffic certainly puts Google in an amazingly dominant position, but guess what, they are already in an amazingly dominant position! It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out.