CA Dems: Scrutiny of Yahoo-Google deal threatens competition

Seeing as how Google and Yahoo are both California companies, California House members have taken it upon themselves to tell the Dept. of Justice to butt out of the advertising swap between the two Internet honchos. In a letter of Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the Democratic reps said:

"We believe that robust competition serves the public interest but if the DOJ blocks this agreement we fear that the threat of additional scrutiny may chill future agreements," the letter says.

"Similar agreements are commonplace in many industries and standard among Internet companies," the letter says. "In fact, Microsoft had a similar agreement with Yahoo and Google has similar arrangements with tens of thousands of companies." (via News.com)

Google has been pushing for the deal to go through with a series of blog posts and op-eds and Yahoo president Mary Decker joined into the fray Monday with a post called Myth-busting and the Yahoo-Google agreement.

In the past year, we have thought about these challenges very carefully and we created a strategy that we’re convinced is a “win win” for Yahoo! and advertisers. The core idea is limited use of Google ads to deliver more value from our SRPs and other inventory in circumstances where we aren’t delivering the best advertiser value today, and then to use resources gained by that strategy to accelerate our investments in the technologies and marketplaces of the future. That’s where the agreement comes in — it allows us to provide better, more valuable connections immediately.

The signers: Anna Eshoo(D), Zoe Lofgren(D), Ellen Tauscher(D), Sam Farr (D), Mike Thompson(D), Mike Honda(D) , Doris Matsui(D), Jackie Speier(D), George Miller(D), Lynn Woolsey(D), Barbara Lee (D).