For one thing, historical precedent strongly suggests the EC will approve the deal. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission voted 4-1 in December in favor of allowing the acquisition; in six years, the EC has never disapproved of a merger of American companies that the FTC has green-lighted.

A more direct indication is the fact that the EC has thus far failed to provide Google with a "statement of objections," a document that officially lays out the agency's objections to a merger. A lawyer representing a European company opposed to the deal conceded that it is "disappointing but true" that Google has not received such a document.

FTC Found No Antitrust Issues

"If they had serious doubts, we're at the point where ... if you don't send [such a statement], you don't have time to complete the case," the lawyer told the Reuters news agency.

In declining to block the merger, the FTC said, "After carefully reviewing the evidence, we have concluded that Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick is unlikely to substantially lessen competition."

The agency said it examined three potential antitrust areas but found no reason to block the merger. It found that Google and DoubleClick were not direct competitors, that the ad-serving market is competitively "vigorous," and that Google wouldn't be able to harm competition by bundling DoubleClick and AdSense. "Because the evidence failed to show that DoubleClick has market power in the third-party ad-serving markets, it is unlikely that Google could effectively foreclose competition in the related ad intermediation market following the acquisition," the commission ruled.

Privacy Looms Over Decision

Earlier this week, the European Parliament held a hearing on privacy issues on the Internet, which largely focused on the privacy implications of the Google-DoubleClick merger. Speaking at the meeting, Google privacy counsel Peter Fleischer complained that European politicians were "trying to take a privacy case and shoehorn it into a competition law review." He said he understood that "people are trying to peddle this theory in Europe after having lost in the United States."

Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch member of the parliament, said privacy is closely connected to competition, however. "The reason you want to have the data is because it gives you a competitive advantage," she said. "It is business. I don't think they can be completely disconnected." Similarly, Cornelia Kutterer, an official of the European consumer agency, said it would be "absurd" for the EC not to look at privacy concerns.

Also speaking at the hearing was FTC commissioner Pamela Harbour, the lone dissenter in the FTC decision, who said the FTC had discounted privacy concerns in its purely antitrust analysis, an approach that didn't "capture the interests of all the parties."

Peter Scharr, the head of an EU group preparing a report on Internet companies' privacy practices, told the hearing that IP addresses should be regarded as personal data.

Google collects IP addresses, it says, to improve search results and to show Internet advertisers that they're paying for legitimate click-throughs. Microsoft doesn't collect IP addresses out of concern for "complete and irreversible anonymity," the company's European privacy official said.