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Bloomberg

Google is being pressed by US Federal Trade Commission chairman Jonathan Leibowitz to offer to resolve the agency's antitrust probe in the next few days or face a lawsuit.
Google had been in discussions with the agency for about two weeks and had not put any remedy proposals on the table, said two sources close to the case.
For almost 20 months, the FTC had been probing whether Google was abusing its dominance of the internet, and it was prepared to sue if the operator of the world's largest search engine failed to make an acceptable proposal, the sources said.
The FTC had told Google it would not accept a resolution short of a consent decree and was prepared to take action in the next week or two, one said.
"We continue to work co-operatively with the Federal Trade Commission and are happy to answer any questions they may have," Adam Kovacevich, a spokesman for Google, said yesterday. Peter Kaplan of the FTC declined to comment.
Specifics about what elements an FTC complaint would contain and whether it would include provisions about Google's practices on search rankings were still under discussion within the agency, a third person familiar with the matter said.
FTC investigators have been probing Google for ranking its own services higher than those of competitors, for signing exclusive agreements to provide search services to online publishers and for making it difficult for advertisers to compare data about campaigns running on rival sites by Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing.
A staff memo sent to the agency's commissioners last month includes a recommendation to issue a complaint for Google's practice of using customer reviews from other websites including Yelp to flesh out its own services on local restaurants and other businesses. The staff have also recommended that the agency issue a complaint against Google for misusing patent protections to block rivals' smartphones from coming to market.
The FTC can file a complaint in its own administrative court or with the federal courts.
Leibowitz said in September that if the agency decided to proceed in its administrative court, it could wrap up the matter more quickly than it could in federal court. No decision had been made about how to proceed, and he expected the matter to be resolved this year, he said.
A settlement or a complaint would require a majority vote of the five commissioners.
The FTC began making calls to hi-tech companies to gather information for its probe in April 2011. Google disclosed in June that year that the FTC had begun a review of its business practices.


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