Dear Chairman Majoras and Commissioners:

On behalf of the Center of the Digital Democracy, I respectfully urge you to impose
conditions designed to protect competition in the matter of Google and DoubleClick.
Since the planned acquisition was announced last spring, we have provided competition
bureau staff with information concerning both the overall competitive conditions of the
interactive advertising marketplace and specific materials related to the two companies
themselves. We have brought in a distinguished professor and one of the country's
leading experts on digital marketing—Professor Joseph Turow of the Annenberg School
at the University of Pennsylvania—to meet with competition staff. We also offered to
provide additional analysis and information, but the staff has not requested such data.
I am alarmed by reports that the commission is about to approve the merger without
imposing any of the conditions required to maintain a semblance of competition in the
interactive advertising market. Given the scale needed to compete with a combined
Google/DoubleClick, there will be insurmountable barriers to entry in the interactive ad
market.

[to read the entire document, download the PDF below]

Politics Online: Expectations for how politicians communicate with voters and how voters will question and give feedback to candidates and elected officials will dramatically change as more campaigning is done through the Internet, which prides itself on being participatory, open, transparent and skewed more toward younger audiences.

Additional RESOURCES

http://www.shambles.net/pages/learning/citizen/toolkit/

Tech Soup

Green Media Toolshed (Network Centric Advocacy)

SPIN Project

Network Centric Advocacy

Free Range Studios

DotOrganize

Aspiration “e-Advocacy Capacity Building”

Airshare.org

• Digital Freedom
• Public Knowledge
• Association of Research Libraries, "Copyright and Intellectual Property Policies"
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Intellectual Property Online: Patent, Trademark, Copyright”
• The Fair Use Network, Free Expression Policy Project
• Negativeland, Intellectual Property Issues
• Coalition for Networked Information, Copyright Forum
• DigitalConsumer.org, Protecting Fair-use Rights in the Digital World
• Stanford University, Copyright and Fair Use
• Center for Social Media, Copyright & Fair Use
• Future of Music Coalition

• Creative Commons
• ibiblio.org
• M.I.T., Open Course Ware (OCW)
• Educause Learning Initiative
• Freedom of Expressions Project
• Openp2p.com, Directory of Peer-to-Peer Projects
• Perseus Digital Library
• Project Gutenberg
• The Public Library of Science
• Internet Archive
• Harvard Law School, CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion