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Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick was the subject of a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., today. Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, testified in opposition to the deal. His prepared remarks are available here. The prepared testimony of David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, is here: PDF, 6 pages.

Smith acknowledged that Microsoft isn't a disinterested observer. At the same time, he said the planned acquisition could hurt the market.

From his prepared remarks:

"If Google and DoubleClick are allowed to merge, Google will become the overwhelmingly dominant pipeline for all forms of online advertising. This merger will almost certainly result in higher profits for the operator of the dominant advertising pipeline, but it will be bad for everyone else. It will be bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and most importantly, bad for consumers."

The hearing also dealt with issues of data privacy. In this story, Wired News covers Drummond's live testimony, rebutting Microsoft.

From the story:

Microsoft has some gall saying that a post-DoubleClick purchase, Google will be dominating online ads because of its massive database on users, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond told a panel of senators Thursday.

"Microsoft is the largest purchaser of online ads, an email service with 280 million or so users and a billion in revenues from display ads," Drummond said. "They have a lot more information than Google has."