Consumer Watchdog and the Center For Digital Democracy contacted the FTC to halt Google from buying AdMob on anti-trust and privacy grounds, according to Tech Crunch.
Tech Crunch includes a letter written to the FTC co-signed by representatives from Consumer Watchdog and the CDD. The highlights of the letter include:
The proposed deal would substantially lessen competition in the increasingly important mobile advertising market.
In addition to the anti-trust issues, the spectre of the combined Google/AdMob raises substantial privacy issues.
Google amasses a goldmine of data by tracking consumers' behavior as they use it search engine and other online services. Combining this information with information collected by AdMob would would give Google a massive amount of consumer data to exploit for their benefit.
How this will impact the approval of the acquisition will make interesting reading in the new year.
