It's not hard to imagine that certain Microsoft execs had started a countdown; as things stood, the Department of Justice would only be monitoring their company for about seven more months. A new development has pushed the antitrust oversight period's end date out to May 12th, 2011, however.
Google and Yahoo! are in the middle of trying to convince the federal government (namely the Justice Department) that their search advertising deal is not an antitrust issue. This has been going on for months as they've tried to convince the entire world of the same.
Google held its Zeitgeist Conference yesterday, and during that conference, CEO Eric Schmidt, and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin held a media roundtable at which they discussed a variety of Google's recent endeavors. Among the topics of course, was the proposed Google-Yahoo! advertising deal, which is currently being scrutinized by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Joanne Bradford has made a lot of career moves in recent memory. She was once Corporate VP of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, then climbed up the ladder to Chief Media Officer and Corporate Vice President of MSN.
What had been a bipartisan look at the future of Internet access, and if broadband firms should be able to charge content providers a premium in exchange for guaranteed digital delivery, became a partisan issue after MoveOn entered the debate.
Despite many months of flailing away at search engines for data to support their claims that casual searches would lead unsuspecting people (especially kids) to adult sites, a study found only about one percent of indexed sites at Google and Microsoft contain explicit content.
Companies like Google, Comcast, Verizon, and Microsoft have recently met with the Department of Justice and the FBI on the suggestions that those Internet companies retain user web activities for as long as two years to help fight terrorism and child pornography.