“Scott Sutherland, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, said the most likely scenario is that the company will take InfoSpace private to save money or merge with the search and media company, Marchex, whose executives are former executives at InfoSpace.”

Just yesterday, I expressed a bit of confusion about why InfoSpace made deals to sell off their mobile services to Motricity, and sell off directory services to Idearc’s Superpages…

Greg Stirling also expressed a bit of wonder about the reasoning behind the deal, too. (I swear we didn’t read each other’s posts before writing our comments!)

Southerland reported that the mobile services unit was actually bleeding money, though, so that explains selling off that portion, perhaps.

Could Sutherland’s merge-with-Marchex theory be right? One still has to wonder why InfoSpace would off-load Switchboard if they were to merge with another local information company, since keeping it would give them much more combined clout. Marchex owns a few directory sites already, including Yellow.com, AreaConnect, and YPeek, but none of these come close to the traffic of Switchboard.

Southerland further theorizes that if they are staying independent instead of merging, and are truly concentrating on developing the business around search, they might focus solely on metasearch, such as found in their Dogpile site.

It’s really going to be interesting to see where this is headed.

Some consumer groups have raised questions about privacy issues involved in having companies which handle more and more of the end-to-end process in users’ clickstreams through the internet, since holding more of the links in the process chain inevitably means being able to ascertain individual’s actions, interests, motives and desires in their day-to-day lives. Read on for more info.

The FTC doesn’t typically focus on privacy issues, however, so this investigation is likely to center more upon concerns that having more of the online industry rolled up under and controlled by fewer large companies could have longterm negative effects on maintenance of a healthily competitive marketplace.

In the search marketing industry, both John Battelle and Danny Sullivan have expressed concerns about portions of the DoubleClick acquisition. DoubleClick is involved in Search Engine Optimization (”SEO”), which is a cottage industry that helps webmasters make their sites more “findable” to users seeking content/info through conducting keyword searches on major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live. Historically, search engines keep mum on the precise workings of how they decide what sites will come up highest or most-relevant for any given keyword search, which set the stage for the birth of the SEO industry. If a search engine is now also offering SEO consulting services, it would appear to be a conflict of interest in the goal of providing best results for users while simultaneously providing best service to their clients. In addition, it instantly introduces at least the appearance of an unfair playing ground to the search engine optimization industry since a search engine’s own employees would logically have the best information and ability to get sites to rank better than any competing SEO firm.

As Danny Sullivan said in his recent post on Microsoft Search Marketing Vs. Google Search Marketing, “It doesn’t look right; it doesn’t feel right.”

It’ll be interesting to see if the FTC agrees that something’s not right. There are definitely some valid concerns about consumer interests, but there appears to’ve been some significant relaxations of anti-monopoly laws in the last few years as evidenced by the continuing mergers in telephone companies and other vertical industries.