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Microsoft: Yahoo Japan/Google Deal "Harmful"

A Microsoft rep is telling Business Insider that the software king will attempt to block a proposed Yahoo Japan/Google partnership. "We plan to present evidence to the Japanese FTC explaining why we believe that this deal is substantially more harmful to competition than Google's deal with Yahoo in 2008 that the DOJ found to be illegal," said the Microsoft rep. By Microsoft's estimates, the Google/Yahoo partnership would amount to a 98% stake of the Japanese search market. "That's more than Yahoo and Google would have owned in the U.S. when the companies were going to join forces to parry Microsoft's Yahoo takeover plans," Business Insider notes.

"The Department of Justice told Yahoo and Google they couldn't team up because they would own too much of the search market." Executive secretary of Japan's FTC, Takahide Matsuyama, said this week: By contrast, Japanese regulators reportedly don't to object to a search monopoly. "In the U.S., the concern was that the companies would go from advertising competitors to collaborators. If they continue to compete for advertisers, the issue of changing your search engine is not an anti-trust problem."

Read the whole story at Business Insider »

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