It seems that Google can't shake off the shadow of monopolyIf a few months ago it was for the purchase of a company related to , now it is of the recent acquisition of the Waze app, which will begin to be investigated by the Federal Trade Commission(FTC are its acronyms in English) of course monopoly And, to Although the profits of Waze are not too high to have caught the attention of this organization since the acquisition was learned, it could have been astrategy to prevent other companies from being able to stand up to Google on the issue ofdigital cartography
The incident was reported by the US newspaper The Wall Street Journal, who was able to confirm that the FTC lawyers have already contacted Google, although their journalists have not obtained comments and statements from the Mountain View company Thus, it is ensured that the acquisition of Waze by Google , which was finally closed for 1.100 million dollars, will begin to be investigated to find out if monopoly has occurredin the process. But why is this happening now?
Apparently, US laws do not oblige to investigate this type of acquisitions if the purchased company does not have a profit greater than 70 million dollars , a figure that Waze does not exceed. Therefore, the system would not have started this process before the purchase was confirmed.Now, in addition, according to the US media outlet that reported the news, there could be other two reasons for which the FTCwould investigate the purchase process.
The first one is that, given the value of Google and, more specifically, of Google Maps globally, where it is the hegemonic tool for maps and navigation, the purchase of Waze could have put a brake on the growth of this application, thus being able to limit its expansion and prevent it from becoming acompetitive force in the future The other key to the investigation would be to find out if the acquisition of Waze did not it was a strategy to prevent other companies from being the ones to stand up to Google, thus limiting competition.Rather more likely given the rumors over the past few months about the purchase of Waze by Facebook and Apple
According to lawyers contacted by The Wall Street Journal, it seems unlikely that the FTC will force Google to cancel its purchase process, although it could demand the non-absorption of Waze For now, the only thing that has come out of this deal is the final price of $1.1 billion, the intent to feed Waze traffic information into the Google tool Maps and transfer the technology of its maps to improve the application However, we will have to wait to find out all the details of theinvestigation and see how this story ends in which the monopoly does not stop stalking the company Mountain View
