Hi, as the original-thought-haver here (and a buyer of DoubleClick's services on various projects 1998-2003), I should clarify -the problem with Google's acquisition of DoubleClick wasn't just about customer scale, or even market power, it was that DoubleClick was already the skeeziest player on the internet, screwing over customers, advertisers and platforms at every opportunity, and culturally antithetical to Google at the time. And there wasn't any way that "Don't Be Evil" was going to win in the long run.

Look how quaint this seems now: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/consumer-gro...