I'm not so sure that Apple was baiting Google into legal trouble. Google CEO Eric Schmidt even said that iAd would help push the AdMob deal through, being "evid

I'm not so sure that Apple was baiting Google into legal trouble. Google CEO Eric Schmidt even said that iAd would help push the AdMob deal through, being "evidence of a highly competitive market." http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B0F820100412 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B0F820100412 My impression was that Apple simply wanted to keep AdMob's mountain of analytics data away from Google, given AdMob's majority share of the in-app iPhone ad market. I doubt even Apple has as much usage statistics as AdMob. This idea would appear to be borne out by recent changes to Apple's iPhone developer terms of service agreement, which seem to limit or even outright ban the sharing of usage data by developers to third parties: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253810 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253810 Of course, Apple did end up buying one of AdMob's lowlier competitors, Quattro. It seems they gave up on keeping user data out of Google's hands, and are now working to raise the standard of advertising on the iPhone while being able to collect a bit of that data themselves.