Of course Microsoft is spewing that they “missed the Internet” back in the 90’s, failed to grab any substantial advertising market share during the dot com boom and then failed again in 2008 with the Yahoo deal.

So if the US government say no to Google, then why wouldn’t it be anticompetitive for Microsoft to own Yahoo? What’s this mean for domainers? Two players owning the entire advertising market! Can you say collusion kids? Ok - it means lower payout rates and a HUGE barrier to entry for a 3rd force.

“Bob” is a GMail user and uses the Google search engine. Google knows:

1. What Bob is searching on via a cookie on his computer. (if he types a url that doesn’t exist into the Google toolbar, that URL gets sent to Google).
2. What domain names he visits (Search + Analytics).
3. Who owns those domains (Google is an ICANN-accredited registrar).
4. What pages he clicks on (Analytics) .
5. What ads he clicks on (Adsense).
6. The content of emails he receives (unlimited data retention from Gmail).
7. Who is sending Bob emails (via “content extraction”).

Of course, in the recent email from Google describing benchmarking, Google said they want to provide “you with transparency, control, and new services”.  I think this was a typo made by Google, they should replace the word “you” with the word “Google”.