From AffiliateDirect to World Domination

The press release from Doubleclick states that their heavy duty affiliate tracking solution is now available to smaller companies in the form of "Affiliate Direct" via their Peformics SEM and Affiliate Solutions company.

Call me stupid, but isn't a bit worrying when you've got a company offering cpm, media buying, affiliate management and now a search engine under one roof?

Surely their competitors should be rightly worried? Would their clients get preference over competing merchants/affiliates?

Also, wouldn't the amount of data about search behaviour and purchases be massively powerful and valuable?

When things were small, they were beautiful. Competition was great and now search monopolies exist and people only ever suffer when this happens. The usual reason business give for their monopolies being beneficial is that they reduce cost. But, choice and competition reduces cost and increases R&D - it's an economic fact. Without adequate competition the pace of progress and innovation will be less and when you consider that all these acquisitions are in fact erecting barriers to entry to for new competitors.

Now there's talk that Google are looking to spend US£2 Billion on Facebook - how good will that be for users? The problem for Google is that they have to put their cash to use, they're not allowed to keep their cash in the bank as investors expect a greater return. Google has to invest it to keep the earnings/share growing. They've let themselves become ubercapitalist which in effect destroyed capitalism to a large degree in the search market.

Anyways, best log off blogger, read some of my Gmails and have a play with YouTube and the check what I'm doing tomorrow on my Google calendar and load some more pics onto Picasa. Why don't we just start a charter to call the world "Google" - it'll just make life easier?

Or could we just stop whinging and develop something better ourselves? Anyone got a couple of billion to chuck at some ideas?