Google turns to the dark side

The NY Times Bits blog has an interesting story about Google’s recent trouble with the law.  It sounds like Google might be in trouble and it’s kind of sad because they’ve had such a great reputation over the years due to adhering to their “do no evil” philosophy.

Life changes when the money starts rolling in, corporate profits and greed corrupts, what else is new?

Two privacy groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission today asking the commission’s chairwoman, Deborah Platt Majoras, to recuse herself from the commission’s review of Google’s merger with DoubleClick.

Ms. Majoras’s husband, John M. Majoras, works at Jones Day, a law firm representing DoubleClick as the merger is considered. Ms. Majoras also worked at Jones Day.

Privacy groups have been fighting Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, an ad-serving company, because they say it would give Google access to too much data about Web users. The Center for Digital Democracy and the Electronic Privacy Information Center jointly filed the complaint today. The two organizations have filed other complaints about the proposed merger.

Jones Day announced that it was representing DoubleClick on Nov. 17, long after the commission began considering the deal. Google announced the $3.1 billion deal with DoubleClick in April.

I’m not sure what the answer is to this DoubleClick drama, but Google needs to fess up if they screwed up on this.  Google ad sense currently has bloggers and small businesses by the balls, pardon my French.  They own online PPC marketing and advertising and their only competition is the “bottom feeding” affiliates and crappy porn advertising companies like Ad Brite.

I’d like to see Google become good.  I have no problem with them making tons of money off of it either, but right now they have a bad operation going on and something has to give.

Fred Soto is an Attorney and Entrepreneur from the Silicon Valley.
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