antitrust

Yahoo and Google are nearing a point where they'll have to decide whether to fish or cut bait on regulatory approval for their search advertising deal.

During the past two months, efforts to appease federal antitrust regulators have gotten bogged down with potential restrictions on the deal. As a result, the companies' enthusiasm for its search advertising partnership has turned into frustration, raising speculation that the parties might walk.

"I still like the concept of the (Yahoo-Google) deal," said one source familiar with the agreement, but who noted taking on a legal challenge by the Department of … Read more

Russian antitrust regulators have blocked Google's acquisition of ZAO Begun, an online advertising unit of Rambler Media.

The companies had agreed to the terms of the $140 million acquisition in July, but Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service said "nyet." According to Svetlana Gladkova's translation of a Russian news report, the reason is that Google hadn't submitted complete information on employees in Russia, so the FAS couldn't evaluate the deal's consequences.

Google is evaluating its next move.

"We are very disappointed to hear that FAS has come to this decision. We strongly believe … Read more

Investors pushed shares of Yahoo up in morning trading Wednesday as analysts point to stronger profit margins due to cost cutting and a healthy increase in its search advertising revenues.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, was down 298.30 points to 8,739.12 and the Nasdaq fell 34.01 points to 1,662.67.

Yahoo rose as high as 5.8 percent to $12.77 a share in intra-day trading, following weak third-quarter results it reported after the markets closed Tuesday. Yahoo's shares were moving in the black in the morning, while the broader markets were posting … Read more

Google and Yahoo are in early-stage negotiations with the U.S. Justice Department to avoid an antitrust challenge to their proposed advertising agreement, according to a report Monday night in The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department and a multistate task force are still reviewing the proposal to decide whether to oppose the partnership, which has been criticized by advertising groups as anticompetitive. In September, the Justice Department hired antitrust litigator Sandy Litvack as a consultant in its networking and technology unit to weigh whether the case could be won at trial, say sources.

Under the nonexclusive partnership, which … Read more

WASHINGTON-- Microsoft has made some progress developing a set of documents required as part of its antitrust consent decree, but the work could be accomplished much more quickly if the company took on a less grudging attitude, state and federal antitrust regulators said Thursday.

The comments were made during a status conference meeting held to asses Microsoft's compliance with the consent decree.

In June, regulators said that the "overview documents" Microsoft prepared did not sufficiently enable third-party licensees to create software interoperable with the company's operating systems. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly agreed that Microsoft had to create … Read more

Microsoft and antitrust regulators will be back in federal court on Thursday, for a regularly scheduled status conference on the software giant's compliance with the final judgment order stemming from its historic consent decree.

In preparation for the upcoming hearing, which will be held in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Microsoft, the Department of Justice, and state antitrust regulators filed a joint status report late last week.

The parties will again address improving the technical documents that Microsoft provides to third-party licensees, which are meant to aid them in making their software interoperable with the Redmond … Read more

Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, said Tuesday that "flawed assumptions" and "questionable methodology" undermine a SearchIgnite study that predicted a 22 percent ad price increase from Yahoo's search-ad deal with Google.

Varian took issue with several elements of the study, but led off with this one: "ad prices are not set by Yahoo or Google, but by advertisers themselves," through the search-ad keyword bidding process. Varian also said the study assumed Yahoo will show Google ads for as many searches as possible, which indeed Yahoo has said isn't its intent. Other … Read more

I'm going to pass on whether Google is a dangerous monopoly that deserves to get hauled into court. The Justice Department will issue a final yea or nay on that question du jour by early October. In the meantime, the list of rivals leaning on the trustbusters for succor gets longer by the day.

The latest is the World Association of Newspapers (aptly named WAN), which represents 77 newspaper associations and 18,000 papers around the globe. WAN wants competition authorities in the U.S. and in Europe to block the Google-Yahoo deal. The position taken by the Paris-based … Read more

Google and Yahoo are household names. But, Sandy Litvack? Not so much.

While Litvack may be obscure to the general public, he is well-known in antitrust circles as a sharp litigator--and one who Yahoo and Google may soon become acquainted with if the Department of Justice challenges the companies' controversial search advertising partnership.

For now, it's unclear whether the scope of the investigation will only focus on the Yahoo-Google deal. Some sources told CNET News that a federal investigation could broaden to examining Google's overall impact on the marketplace.

But there’s little question that bringing in Litvack … Read more