A couple of days after showing how deep their affection is for users finding the right privacy features in Google products, the company acknowledged the European Union for its acceptance of open standards.
The night before the Federal Trade Commission gave the Google-DoubleClick deal its rubberstamp of approval, Google published videos to its privacy channel on YouTube, featuring ways of using the privacy options within Google services.
Privacy issues were heatedly discussed in relation to the antitrust review by the FTC, to the point where one of the five Commissioners voted against approving the deal. The other four Commissioners, two of whom are married to partners at the law firm representing DoubleClick’s antitrust interests before the EU, voted in favor of approval.
Now the always interesting Google Public Policy blog has taken time to report on countries in the EU who are standing up to those awful proprietary standards people (coughMicrosoftcough) and looking at open standards and open source.
We’re all in favor of openness and competition. Consumers end up with better services, and writers always have something to cover as companies go at each other continually.
The timing of the latest Public Policy post, coming on the heels of the FTC’s DoubleClick approval and in the midst of the EU’s antitrust review of the same acquisition, emits the aroma of a little public relations couched as a newsy discussion by Google’s European Policy team.
It may or may not help Google as Neelie Kroes and the rest of the European Commission looking over the merger have indicated that, yes, privacy concerns do matter with DoubleClick.
We think Kroes and company will ultimately do what their FTC counterparts did: approve the deal and warn Google they’ll be watching for any privacy shenanigans.
