Did Antitrust Laws kill a deal between Yahoo and Google?
Yes and no. In 2008, Yahoo and Google were ready to sign a deal that would have let Yahoo place Google ads on some Yahoo search results, and the companies would have shared the resulting revenue. The deal would have let Yahoo show ads on pages where its own technology, called Panama, wasn’t able to provide results, the company said. Basically, Yahoo was going to benefit from the fact that Google had more advertisers, and Google would have benefitted because it would have made money from Yahoo search results.
Objections from the Justice Department
But, the deal ran into objections from America’s Justice Department anti-trust regulators, who are responsible for preventing deals like these where companies could monopolize a certain field and prevent competition from others.
Competition is encouraged because consumers are the ones who benefit with lower prices and better service.
Google backed out of the deal
So, what ended up happening was that Google backed out of the deal after 4 months of review. So, answering the original question – no, the deal between Google and Yahoo was not killed by Antitrust Laws since no one said that they were in violation of any anti-trust laws. But, there were objections from the Department of Justice – which means that if the deal had gone through, they may have eventually been accused of breaking Anti-Trust laws.