Mountain View, Calif. — With great power comes the feds taking an extra interest in your company — just ask Google. Or in a previous year, Microsoft.
The billion dollar giant has hit another delay in purchasing AdMeld as a result of the U.S. Department of Justice’s “second request” for more information.
Google was planning to purchase Admeld, a business that helps companies through display ad optimization — a way of getting the best possible deals for ads on a number of networks. The $400 million acquisition could bring Google one step closer to dominating online display advertising, something the feds have been concerned about for some time.
Google, however, used a blog post Wednesday to say they aren’t too worried over the DOJ’s request, and that this second request isn’t unusual.
“This doesn’t surprise us, as today’s display advertising industry is very new and highly complex,” said Neal Mohan, vice president of display advertising at Google. “But we’ll work to enable this review to be concluded as quickly as possible – display advertising is highly competitive and fast moving, and we don’t want our efforts to bring better services to our clients to be delayed.”
This isn’t the first time, however, that Google’s acquisitions were halted by investigators. Back in 2007 the company acquired DoubleClick for $3.2 billion and paid $750 million to buy travel service ITA. Both of those cases took more than six months to close.
Law.com called Google’s potential antitrust investigation a replica of Microsoft, which faced similar feats in the 1990s.
Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/3sreah2 (Google’s Blog)
http://tinyurl.com/3vkkz63 (Law.com)
http://tinyurl.com/3ng8w6d (Business Insider)
Photo by flickr user HarshLight, used under Creative Commons license
