Google's 9-Month Old ITA Acquisition Proposal Approved by Regulators

A few months shy of a year since being announced, the Google - ITA acquisition has finally been approved by the US Department of Justice. For a while, it looked like this would be the big Google acquisition that will be challenged but it did not happen.

Instead, Google agreed to some quite stringent conditions that require the company to continue to offer ITA software and services to competitors and also not use the data it may acquire from those competitors for its own means, other than providing the current services.

There will be audits for the next five years to ensure that Google sticks to its part of the deal. In return, Google will finally be able to offer a flight search vertical to compete with Bing's or the dedicated specialized search engines and travel sites, many of which use ITA data or software.

"We're excited that the U.S. Department of Justice today approved our acquisition," Jeff Huber, Senior Vice President, Commerce and Local at Google, announced.

"Today we’ve formally committed to let ITA’s customers extend their contracts into 2016. We've also agreed to let both current and new customers license ITA’s QPX software on 'fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms' into 2016," he added, commenting on some of the conditions imposed by the DoJ.

While Google has promised to ensure that ITA software, data and services continue to be available and developed for the next few years, keeping existing customers and soon to be competitors supplied, the company has made it no secret that it plans to start offering its own flight search tools as soon as possible. The acquisition itself should be closing soon as well.

"We’re moving to close this acquisition as soon as possible, and then we’ll start the important work of bringing our teams and products together. We’re confident that by combining ITA’s expertise with Google’s technology we’ll be able to develop exciting new flight search tools for all our users," Huber explained.