Yahoo Has No Fear, Not on the FTC Blacklist

Yahoo's acquisition of email software company Zimbra was approved by the Federal Trade Commission, the transaction being supposed to get finalized in the upcoming days. According to Reuters, the FTC analyzed the agreement between the two companies in order to find out if it can harm the competition or if it infringes the antitrust laws. "Antitrust authorities took a preliminary look at the deal and said it posed no antitrust concerns, the FTC said in a statement," Reuters reported.

Google seems to be the only company which is not allowed to compete a transaction as its DoubleClick acquisition has been long discussed by most of the regulators from both Europe and United States. In case you didn't hear about the case, Google announced a long time ago that it reached an agreement to buy DoubleClick, a powerful online advertising firm for $3.1 billion. Because other web giants such as AT&T and Microsoft were afraid that this move will make Google too powerful for them, they demanded the regulators to investigate the deal and if needed, to block it.

Since then, the super giant Google has struggled to convince the authorities that a potential merger between it and DoubleClick would not infringe the antitrust laws and would not harm the competition. The main reason of the complaints was that Google is already a top player in the online advertising market and, if allowed to buy DoubleClick, which is also a very powerful company, it can become too powerful for the competition.

Last month Google's representatives talked with the members of the Senate in order to present the reasons for allowing the acquisition. However, Microsoft also made a statement which demands the regulators to block the transaction for the same reasons mentioned above.

"Now, already Google is the dominant company for one of the two main types of online advertising, search online ads. Roughly 70 percent of global spending on searchbased advertising today flows through Google's AdWords service," Brad Smith, senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary, Microsoft Corporation, said about the Google advertising system.