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Google announced in June that it had struck a deal with Yahoo, so it would sell ads on Yahoo website in return for a share of the profits. The EU anti-competition authorities confirms that they are investigating the deal between the two majors in the online advertising.

The major competitors claimed that this new deal gives a dominant position for Google. This is why the agreement has also been investigated for some months by the US Department of Justice that hired a well-known Washington litigator to oversee the anti-trust proceedings.

Although the companies said that the deal would have effect only in Canada and the United States, The World Association of Newspapers called for a investigation from the EU authorities, claiming: "it would hurt Yahoo's ability to compete against Google in the future."

Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, confirmed the investigation :"In mid-July, we decided to open a preliminary investigation on our own initiative into potential effects of the Google-Yahoo agreement on competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) market."

Google claimed that the deal would have no effect on the EEA market, since "the agreement is limited in scope to Yahoo's U.S. and Canadian websites", while Yahoo showed his cooperation with the EU authorities stating that the company "has been and will continue to work with the relevant regulatory agencies to provide officials with the necessary information about this business agreement, which we believe will strengthen competition in search and make advertisements more relevant for our users."

As it was the case with the Google - Doubleclick deal, it seems that both the US and EU authorities will not investigate the privacy issues of the new Google-Yahoo agreement, even though serious concerns have already been expressed.

EDRi-member Joris van Hoboken points out the Google blog entry related to the Google-Yahoo deal that claims: "neither company has access to personally identifiable user information from the other company", giving no explanation on what the two companies understand by "personally identifiable information". Since server logs are not considered by Google as personally identifiable information, it could be possible that the present deal gives Google access to Yahoo search data.

EU competition officials probing Google-Yahoo deal (15.09.2008)
http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSBRU00674420080915?page...

European regulators investigate Google-Yahoo advertising deal (16.09.2008)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/sep/16/google.yahoo

The Google-Yahoo Deal and the Privacy of End-Users (20.09.2008)
http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=189