14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo Japan announced earlier this week, somewhat surprisingly, that the Microsoft’s Bing won’t be powering its search capabilities and that the company is going with Google. Yahoo Japan is independent of Yahoo, who only owns a minority 35 percent stake, but it was believed that it will get in line with the US company.
Microsoft, expectantly, was very critical of the proposed deal which would create a search monopoly for Google in the country. And now it has confirmed that it will take legal steps to block the deal from happening.
“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,” a Microsoft representative told Business Insider.
Surprisingly, Japanese regulators seem to have no problem with the deal that would give Google control over 98 percent of the market. The figure comes from Microsoft, but independent measurements show that Yahoo combined with Google own at least 90 percent of the Japanese search market. The same figure stands for the paid search market in the country.
The regulators claim that because the two companies will compete in the advertising market, it doesn’t matter if the searches are powered by the same company. But under the Yahoo Japan-Google deal, the latter would also be serving the search ads for the portal. Yahoo would only control other types of advertising.
Microsoft now says it will try to persuade the Japanese regulators that the deal is bad for competition and plans to take steps in that direction. Up to this point, officials have had no issues with the deal and have said that it presents no problem so it remains to be seen if Microsoft’s move will sway their opinion.