EU, Justice Clear Microsoft, Yahoo Deal
Both the Justice Department and European Commission have green-lighted a search alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft, which owns the search engine Bing, the companies said Thursday. Teaming up to better challenge search leader Google, the companies announced the partnership in July but had to wait for approval from regulators.
The companies will now turn to implementing the deal, they said. Both search engines will continue to operate, but each company will now harness strengths of the other to improve the two platforms. Harnessing its technological skill, Microsoft's Bing will provide the search results that will appear on both sites. Yahoo will sell paid search ads across both platforms, making newcomer Bing more attractive to ad buyers. The companies will continue to compete for "audience, engagement, and clicks," their statement said.
The alliance aims to chip away at the search dominance of Google, which has 65.4 percent of the U.S. search market. Bing has 11.3 percent and Yahoo has 17 percent, according to January search data from comScore. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement that regulatory approval is an "exciting milestone" and that together the companies will "promote more choice, better value and greater innovation to our customers as well as to advertisers and publishers."
In a news release, the European Commission, the European Union's regulatory arm, said its investigation of the deal "has shown that not only market participants do not expect the transaction to have any negative effects on competition or on their business, but they also expect it to increase competition in Internet search and search advertising by allowing Microsoft to become a stronger competitor to Google."
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Antitrust
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