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Japan FTC May Review Yahoo-Google Deal

The Wall Street Journal reports the largest online retailer in Japan, Rakuten has asked the Japan Fair Trade Commission to review the Yahoo-Google deal from a few months back.

A Rakuten spokesperson said:

The tie-up between the two firms would result in Google monopolizing information, which could hinder the development and growth of not only search engines but many Internet-related services in Japan.

As we know, Microsoft said they will also challenge the deal where they said:

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.

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Federal Trade Commission Google Japan Microsoft Monopoly Rakuten Search engine The Wall Street Journal United States antitrust law United States Department of Justice Yahoo!
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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

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