Google-Yahoo: DOJ Would Have FIled An Antitrust Lawsuit; Competition Concerns Trumped Anything Else
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
So says the Department of Justice, in a statement: DOJ "informed the companies that it would file an antitrust lawsuit to block the implementation of the agreement. The Department said that, if implemented, the agreement between these two companies accounting for 90 percent or more of each relevant market would likely harm competition in the markets for Internet search advertising and Internet search syndication."
A revised Google-Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) deal didn't do the trick either: "The Department concluded that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Yahoo! would have become collaborators rather than competitors for a significant portion of their search advertising businesses, materially reducing important competitive rivalry between the two companies. Although the companies proposed various modifications to their original agreement in an effort to address the Department's antitrust concerns, the Department determined that such modifications would not eliminate the competition concerns raised by the agreement."
And on that competition, this chilling effect: " Had the companies implemented their arrangement, Yahoo!'s competition likely would have been blunted immediately with respect to the search pages that Yahoo! chose to fill with ads sold by Google rather than its own ads, and Yahoo! would have had significantly reduced incentives to invest in areas of its search advertising business where outsourcing ads to Google made financial sense for Yahoo!"
The full statement is here.
By Rafat Ali