Aug 11, 2011 13:44 GMT  ·  By

Last month, the US Federal Trade Commission started a broad investigation of Google's business, looking into whether the company abuses its power to overtake competitors.

Now, there's more data on the areas that the investigation focuses on and they're mostly things that should have been anticipated.

The Android operating system is a concern, according the Wall Street Journal, citing people close to the matter, as investigators fear that the company may be blocking its partners from including competing services on their phones.

Another area of focus is the services Google integrates as features for its search site. Things like Places get preferential placement, on top of the regular, organic results, and the FTC is looking to see if this is an abuse of its position, on Google's part.

Finally, the FTC is also investigating whether Google is being unfair in using snippets of contents from competitors, reviews from Yelp for example, on its own properties, which target the same market.

It is still early and the investigation could take at least a year. After that the FTC will decide whether there is a case to be pursued and sue Google, or just back off.

While there are still questions that the FTC wants answered, there doesn't seem to be much of a case so far, unless the agency really manages to dig up something compromising.

While Google does keep a strong grip on Android, phone-makers are in no way banned from adding any app or bundling any service, even ones that compete with Google, into the devices they sold.

There are Android devices that come with Bing as the default search engine, from partners that work closely with Google.

Of course, Amazon is working on its own flavor of Android which will likely not feature any Google app, although this means that Amazon does not a have license agreement with Google and only has access to the core Android OS, which is open source.

In terms of placing its products above organic searches, Google argues that it is sometimes best to provide straight up answers rather than search results.

What's more, Google should be free to do whatever it wants to its own properties and sites, regardless of talks of the ill conceived, so-called 'search neutrality.

Finally, Google has already taken steps about the last concern, it has recently removed all third-party review snippets from Google Places for example, relying exclusively on content from its own users.