14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo Japan's deal with Google for the latter to power searches for the Japanese portal has been approved by local regulators. The Fair Trade Commission gave the go-ahead for the deal but said that it will continue to monitor for violations.
The authorities have been investigating a proposed deal between the two biggest search engines in Japan which would grant Google control over an overwhelming majority of the market.
After several months of scrutiny the commission concluded that there are no anti-trust issues, since the two search engines will be separate, and the two companies will be able to proceed with the plans.
Earlier this year, Yahoo Japan announced that it has selected Google to power its searches and search ads, in a rather surprising move.
Yahoo announced last year that it will be dropping internal efforts to develop search technologies and will instead outsource the task.
It partnered with Microsoft's Bing to provide the search results as well as paid links, but the deal only technically covered the US. This summer Yahoo transitioned to Bing-powered searches in the US and Canada.
However, Yahoo Japan, despite the name, is not owned by Yahoo. The US company has a minority stake of 35 percent, but Yahoo Japan is mostly owned and run by Softbank, the largest mobile operator in the country which also owns several big online properties.
As such, Yahoo Japan went with Google as a search provider, not with the expected Bing, citing technical reasons. Yahoo Japan claimed that Bing's technology is simply not on par with Google's.
In the US, this is arguable, Bing is largely considered to be a valid competitor to Google. However, the picture is very different in Japan where Bing has a very, very small share of the market and doesn't offer the same tools and technologies as in the US.
Yahoo Japan controls about 50 percent of the search market in the country and Google follows with a 40 percent share. When the deal is completed, Google will be powering the vast majority of searches and search ads in Japan.