It’s official: The much-reported on (by us) Google-Doubleclick merger has been approved today by a 4-to-1 vote by the FTC, reports the E-Commerce News’ Keith Regan.

Acquiring DoubleLick, the leader in click advertising, is seen as a huge step for Internet behemoth Google, and is expected to extend its long reach even farther across the Internet.

The proposed merger was hotly opposed by Microsoft, Yahoo!, AT&T and a chorus of other competitors. Yet that didn’t stop the FTC from issuing its decision today, leaving “many unanswered questions regarding the vulnerability of consumers’ private data,” Regan quotes Sterling Market Intelligence Founding Principal Analyst Greg Sterling.

The Federal Trade Commission authorized the deal after its investigation found that Google’s US$3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick would be “unlikely to substantially lessen competition,” as some rivals, including Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft, had argued. The decision disappointed many privacy advocates, who had urged the FTC to consider the data-tracking implications of the merger.

… “The markets within the online advertising space continue to quickly evolve, and predicting their future course is not a simple task,” the FTC says in its ruling. “Accounting for the dynamic nature of an industry requires solid grounding in facts and the careful application of tested antitrust analysis. Because the evidence did not support the theories of potential competitive harm, there was no basis on which to seek to impose conditions on this merger.

“We want to be clear, however, that we will closely watch these markets and, should Google engage in unlawful tying or other anticompetitive conduct, the commission intends to act quickly,” the FTC adds.

The approval underscores what the search company has argued all along: that the merger will not decrease competition in the online ad space.

However, even with the FTC’s ruling, the deal isn’t 100 percent final: Google must also win approval from the European Union regulators before the two companies can begin merging. “Google has said it is hopeful it can close the merger by early 2008,” Regan writes, but

Google may not be out of the woods just yet. The European Commission has signaled it is engaged in an intensive review of the deal and, earlier this week, a group of privacy advocates said they would consider a lawsuit if FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras did not recuse herself from the DoubleClick vote. Those groups said Majoras has a conflict because her husband works at a law firm representing the ad agency.

Not surprisingly, opponents were quick to issue statements condemning the approval:

“Despite the FTC’s claims, privacy is most certainly an antitrust issue,” Center for Digital Democracy Executive Director Jeff Chester said. “A key component of the online market dominance that companies such as Google have achieved is the aggregation and analysis of consumer profiles, including the merger of far-flung data sets and vast data warehouses that only a handful of companies now have at their disposal.”

The FTC essentially “sanctioned the creation of a new digital data colossus,” he added. “The FTC is supposed to protect the privacy of Americans in the digital age. The excuse offered by the majority of the commission — that consumer privacy can’t be addressed by current antitrust law — reveals a lack of leadership and determination to protect U.S. consumers.”

Bestselling author, “New Marketing” expert, and author of the self-described “most popular marketing blog in the world,” Seth Godin is a business blogger and guru dedicated to the idea of re-evaluating traditional business marketing practices.

He’s best known for modern marketing philosophies that, among many other things, work to discredit spam while promoting the idea that you shouldn’t have to use tricks to market your product — if it’s a quality product, tricks aren’t necessary. (Check out his website here, and his blog here.)

Yesterday, BNET blogger Lori Deschene offered an insightful interview with Mr. Godin, as well as a helpful rundown/review of his latest book, “Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?” The summary included

14 trends marketers need to embrace to avoid eating meatball sundaes, which Godin explains as such:

“A meatball is a worthwhile commodity. They are things we need and sold to everyone. The sundae is the hot fudge and the peanuts, the tactics of social media and the MySpace profiles. These things work but they work best when they’re not on meatballs, but when they’re on an organization designed to work with them.”

Based on a reading of the book and special interview with Mr. Godin, Ms. Deschene’s BNET article described Godin’s 14 “New Marketing” techniques as such:

1. Direct Communication - there is a trend towards an increase in direct communication between producers and consumers. More feedback mechanisms are appearing.

2. Amplifying the Voice of Individuals - power to the people. Everyone has become a critic. This can be a good thing. Viral is all the rage.

3. The Idea of having an Authentic Story - Seth mentioned the fact that there are scraps of material out there and the need for having an authentic story to tell.

4. Lack of Attention Span - have we trained people to have shorter attention spans? Seth reminisced about the fact that in the 40’s commercials used to be 30 minutes long. Is the 30 second spot still an efficient way to educate potential prospects and consumers about your product and services? Just how successful are those Super Bowl commercials anyway? So long as the ads generate revenue, does it matter?

5. All About the Long-Tail- we’ve discussed the long-tail of SEO on numerous occasions. There is a definite trend towards long-tail and providing a choice for people.

6. Outsourcing - there is a definite trend towards outsourcing. Seth pointed out that “… it can be easier to change the manual than to change the people…”

7. Google and the Other Search Engines are “atomizing” the World - Seth also touched on the fact that bundling (all of your services) may not and does not always work.

8. Infinite Channels of Information - a.k.a. creating noise. I like to call this “touch points” or interception points. This creates the elimination of a bottleneck as you should build and create your own channels (and no I’m not talking about Yahoo Pipes).

9. Consumers Can Talk Directly to other Consumers - power to the people part two.

10. Shift in Scarcity and Abundance - stuff that used to be abundant is now scarce and vice versa.

11. Big Idea can reach a large number of people - a big idea is something that changes the world or the big idea’s direct environment forever.

12. Shift of How Many to Who? - This is huge as “who” has become much more important than “How Many”. Mass marketing is seeing a transformation.

13. Identification of who is wealthy and who is not - you cannot always predict who is who.

14. New Gatekeepers and No Gate Keepers - you’ll have to read the book for more on this.

Godin’s book is available for sale on December 27. The original BNET article can be viewed here.

In a recent article, L.A. Times staff writer Abigail Goldman tells of a relatively new “green” movement to save paper: Stopping the excessive printing of emails.

It’s the kind of idea that may seem like small potatoes, but that could add up to something significant if it gains enough traction.

From the article:

The trend took off in March, when the popular environmental website TreeHugger.com encouraged readers to add the don’t-print plea to their automatic e-mail signatures.

Since then, the message has spread beyond the granola-and-Birkenstock crowd to the cubicle armies of corporate America. Architects, airline employees and even button-down accountants have gotten in on the act, as have companies such as media giant News Corp.

The parent of Fox Television offers employees a catchy admonition that riffs on the company’s “Cool Change” environmental initiative: “Be cool, consider the environment. Please don’t print this e-mail unless you really need to.”

… “It’s a testament to how cool green is that this particular message is appearing in so many business communications,” said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Environmentalists say the don’t-print message has genuine merit. Despite 20th century predictions of a paperless office, Americans use enough sheets every year to build a 10-foot-high wall that would stretch from New York to Tokyo and beyond, according to GreenPrint Technologies, which sells software to eliminate unnecessary pages before printing.

At the same time, an estimated 97 billion e-mails whisk through cyberspace every day. Technology trackers say more e-mails invariably mean more printouts, if for no other reason than that printing has become a habit. Last year, 53% of people surveyed told research firm IDC that they printed more because of e-mail. That means more paper, and more energy to shred or recycle it.

The growing mountains of printed pages encouraged Michael Graham Richard, TreeHugger.com’s editor, to get behind the please-don’t-print movement after he saw the auto-signature for the first time last winter.

This makes sense to us. One of the natural advantages of electronic communications should be reduced use of traditional natural resources like paper. And yet, for many of us, the habit of printing all of our emails is very ingrained.

Not everyone is convinced: According to the article, some believe that the movement only serves to provide a “kind of smug satisfaction about how green [you] are,” instead of actually taking a greater action to benefit the environment.

That may be; yet, there are benefits that go beyond the “green” trend:

Having a no-print policy along with scheduled purges of e-mails can help a business stave off spending millions of dollars to produce documents connected to lawsuits, Kahn said.

The bottom line? Eliminating waste is always a net positive, whether you’re looking at the environment, your recycling bills, or your own sense of “green” guilt.

So, here’s to hoping this movement catches hold. Spread the word. (And check out the original article in the Los Angeles Times here.)

The controversies surrounding major Internet companies and their methods of advertising continue. Today CNET News printed the latest on the proposed Google/DoubleClick $3 billion merger and the criticism it’s getting from industry observers.

The merger has plenty of opponents — from consumer advocates who want to limit Google’s power to competitors such as Microsoft who fear the Internet giant’s seemingly unstoppable growth — and those opponents are doing all they can to stop the proposed partnership from happening.

The trouble is, there’s not a whole lot they can do.

The options for shutting down the proposed merger primarily involve the courtroom, the FTC, and trying to win the interest of well-placed Congressional members. From the CNET article:

The FTC is reviewing the proposed merger, which Microsoft and a band of pro-regulatory groups are hoping to derail it. The FTC could allow the deal to proceed, attempt to block it, or attempt to impose conditions. In Europe, antitrust bureaucrats said last month that they were conducting their own investigation and would make a decision by April 2, 2008.

Meanwhile, a top Republican in the House of Representatives is demanding that Google answer a barrage of questions about privacy, some of which are related to the proposed DoubleClick purchase. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), a critic of the proposed merger, last month complained in a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt that the company had initially agreed to let his aides visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., but then didn’t confirm a date.

Barton is the senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has Internet regulation as one of its responsibilities. Most of Barton’s 24 questions deal with what Google does with search queries, how long information is kept, what data will be merged with DoubleClick’s, and how the company performs its partial anonymization of search results.

To get more details from Steven Musil’s original story on CNET, click here.

In a world of runaway consumer technology, an article proclaiming to name the 8 “Most Dangerous” items among them may seem … alarmist? Sensationalistic?

Be that as it may, when viewed from a business owner or manager’s perspective, the threats posed by everyday (and seemingly harmless) consumer technologies are signifcant. From security breaches to stolen information, many of these technologies are risky by their very nature (info storing and transfer; ease of photography).

With that in mind, we bring you ComputerWorld’s list of “8 Most Dangerous Consumer Technologies.” The run-down:

1. Instant messaging

… Instant messaging present numerous security challenges. Among other things, malware can enter a corporate network through external IM clients and IM users can send sensitive company data across insecure networks.

Among ComputerWorld’s suggested solutions is to “phase out consumer IM services and use an internal IM server.”

2. Web mail

… The problem with consumer e-mail services such as those from Google, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo is that the users themselves don’t realize how insecure their e-mail exchanges are because messages are transported over the Web and stored on the ISP’s server as well as the e-mail provider’s server. Without that awareness, many use no discretion about sending sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, passwords, confidential business data or trade secrets.

ComputerWorld suggests working to eliminate these security risks by using a “tool that monitors e-mail content using keyword filters and other detection techniques and the either generates alerts regarding potential breaches or simply blocks the e-mail from being sent. For instance, WebEx Communications is considering expanding its use of a data loss prevention tool from Reconnex Inc. to include e-mail monitoring, according to Michael Machado, director of IT infrastructure.”

3. Portable storage devices

One of an IT manager’s biggest fears … is the steady proliferation in types of portable storage, ranging from Apple iPhones and iPods to flash memory devices. “People can use these to download any number of corporate secrets or sensitive information and move it off-site, which is not where IT wants that information to be.”

Locking down employees’ USB ports is not the solution, the article states. Instead, “handle the matter by educating people on how to treat the storage of sensitive information.”

4. PDAs and smart phones

More and more employees are showing up at work with some form of smart phone or personal digital assistant, be it a BlackBerry, a Treo or an iPhone. But when they try to synch up their device’s calendar or e-mail application with their own PC, it can cause problems ranging from application glitches to the blue screen of death.

… Moreover, should the employee quit or be fired, he can walk out the door with any information he wants, as long as the PDA or smart phone belongs to him.

The suggested solution here is the use of WebEx, which “minimizes those possibilities by standardizing on a single brand and model of PDA and letting employees know the IT organization will only support that one device.”

5. Camera phones

A hospital worker stands at a nursing station, casually chatting with the nurses. No one notices she’s got a small device in her hand, on which, from time to time, she’s pressing a small button. A scene from the latest spy thriller? No, a security test conducted by DeKalb’s Finney.

“One of the tests I did was to go to take my cell phone to the nursing station and start clicking off photos, unbeknownst to them,” she says. “I wanted to download the photos, enhance the images and see what I got — patient information displayed on computer screens or on papers lying on the desk.”

Again, the suggested solution is to educate people about the dangers, which often are unrealized by the very people in the position to abuse them.

6. Skype and other consumer VoIP services

Another fast-growing consumer technology is Skype, a downloadable software-based service that allows users to make free Internet phone calls. … In a business setting, the threat presented by Skype and similar services is the same as that of any consumer software downloaded to a corporate PC.

… The most secure option, and one that research firm Gartner Inc. recommends, is to block Skype traffic altogether. If a business chooses not to do that, it should actively engage in version control of Skype clients using configuration management tools and ensure that it is distributed only to authorized users.

7. Downloadable widgets

According to Yankee Group, consumers are using devices such as the Q and the Nokia E62 to download widgets that give them quick access to Web applications. These widgets can be easily moved to PCs, which … represent another entry point into the technology ecosystem that IT struggles to control.

The risk here is that these tiny programs use processing power on the PC and the network. And beyond that, any software that gets downloaded without being vetted represents a potential threat.

Once more, the suggested solution involves WebEx, which “mitigates this risk using a threefold approach. It educates users on the risks of software downloads; it uses Reconnex to monitor what’s installed on user PCs; and it disables some of the users’ default access rights, restricting their download capabilities.”

8. Virtual worlds

Business users are beginning to experiment with virtual worlds such as Second Life, and as they do, IT needs to become more aware of the accompanying security concerns.

… Using Second Life involves downloading a large amount of executable code and putting it inside the corporate firewall. … In addition, there’s really no way to know the actual identities of the avatars who populate the virtual world.

The article offers a possible way around this dilemma: “One option … is enabling employees to access their virtual worlds over the company’s public wireless network or encourage them to do it from home. A third option is for companies to evaluate tools to create their own virtual environments that would be hosted internally within the enterprise firewall.”

Check out the original article, written by ComputerWorld.com’s Mary Brandel, here.