Google told the United States Senate that “online advertising benefits consumers” while defending its deal to purchase “advertising tools supplier” DoubleClick:

“The online advertising business is complex, but my message to you today is simple: Online advertising benefits consumers, promotes free speech, and helps small businesses succeed. Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick will help advance these goals while protecting consumer privacy and enabling greater innovation, competition, and growth.”

“In our experience, our users value the advertisements that we deliver along with search results and other web content because the ads help connect them to the information, products, and services they seek. Simply put, advertising is information, and relevant advertising is information that is useful to consumers. The advertising we deliver to our users complements the natural search results that we provide, because our users are often searching for products and services that our advertisers offer. Making this connection is critical. In fact, we strive to deliver the ads that are the most relevant to our users, not just the ones that generate the most revenue for us.”

Do you appreciate Google’s relevant advertising? We’re too lazy to form an opinion of all of this, so we’ll just link to Cory Doctorow’s new story about an evil Google.

Our Senate testimony on online advertising and Google-DoubleClick [Google Public Policy Blog]
Scroogled [Radar]

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