Exclusive: U.S. asks about search fairness in Google/ITA
(Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department's review of Google Inc's planned acquisition of airline ticketing software company ITA Software is focusing on making sure ITA's products remain available, even to Google's rivals, according to a source close to the deal.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's plan to buy airline-ticketing software firm ITA Software, confirmed in late January 2011, has drawn the Justice Department into a review whose center of gravity is unusual: per a source close to the deal, the question is less market share than whether ITA's products remain available even to Google's travel-search rivals.
The scrutiny lands amid a burst of curation decisions at Google itself the same week — a spam-reduction algorithm change, filtering of BitTorrent and RapidShare results over piracy concerns, and the retirement of real-estate property search on Maps — each a reminder that whoever owns the ranking layer decides what users see, which is precisely the fairness question the DOJ is now asking about travel.
First-order effects
- The DOJ's focus on product availability signals any clearance will carry access conditions, directly affecting travel-search firms that depend on ITA's ticketing software.
- Google's deal timeline stretches under review, with approval contingent on commitments it has not yet made publicly.
Second-order effects
- Rival travel sites gain leverage: their continued access becomes the explicit test of the merger, strengthening their hand in demanding formal nondiscrimination terms before the deal closes.
- Hard access commitments would erode part of the strategic value Google is paying for, pressuring it to renegotiate scope or walk away if conditions bite too deep.
Third-order effects
- The DOJ appears to be building a template for vertical acquisitions by dominant platforms — approving the purchase only alongside guarantees that the acquired input stays open to competitors — a structure that could become standard whenever a search gatekeeper buys an upstream data or software supplier.
- The review folds into a broader 'search neutrality' debate: as regulators treat ranking decisions as objects of policy, platform owners face rising pressure to separate ownership of inputs from control of distribution.
The trend: Antitrust authorities are reframing acquisitions by dominant search platforms as distribution-neutrality questions, conditioning deals on the acquired technology remaining open to rivals rather than simply counting market concentration.