“The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is poised to serve Google Inc. with civil subpoenas… signaling the start of a wide-ranging, formal antitrust investigation into whether the search giant has abused its dominance on the Web,” Thomas Catan reports for The Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter.”
“The five-member commission is preparing to send Google the formal demands for information within days, the people said,” Catan reports. “Other companies are also likely receive official requests for information about their dealings with Google at a later stage, they said.”
Catan reports, “From Google’s perspective, the FTC’s embryonic antitrust probe is the most serious to date in the U.S… [as it] will examine fundamental issues relating to Google’s core search advertising business, which still accounts for the overwhelming majority of its revenues. Those will include whether Google—which accounts for around two-thirds of internet searches in the U.S. and more abroad—unfairly channels users to its own growing network of services at the expense of rivals’.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “TheMacAdvocate” for the heads up.]