U.S. antitrust regulators may investigate Google Inc's dominance of the Web search industry, and will settle on the agency to launch a probe once scrutiny into the company's plan to buy ITA software is done, a source told Reuters on Tuesday.
The Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department will decide which has more expertise and whether to launch a formal investigation once the latter wraps up the ITA probe, the source said.
"They're waiting for ITA to pop," said the source, who spoke anonymously to preserve business relationships.
Shares of Google fell more than 3.2 percent on Tuesday, following a Bloomberg report that the FTC is considering an antitrust investigation.
The FTC and Justice Department declined to comment.
Google's proposed acquisition of ITA for $700 million has sparked worries in the tech world that travel websites such as Orbitz Worldwide Inc, Kayak and TripAdvisor could be deprived of ITA's software. Google announced plans to acquire ITA Software for $700 million in cash in July.
Google is definitely big enough to throw its weight around these days, and fair is fair. If practically every search algorithm on the net is controlled by Google, well, that's not exactly a competitive situation. Ironically, Google's biggest ally right now is probably Microsoft and its Bing engine, which is why I think nothing will come from this probe...if there even is one.
Still, we'll see.
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