Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The Australian competition watchdog has confirmed it will investigate the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo search partnership and its potential impact on local advertising and media markets.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said it would list
the 10-year strategic relationship on its Mergers Register later today.
The listing process confirms that the ACCC has extended its interest in the
announcement beyond a watching brief.
Search giant Google, meanwhile, issued a two line corporate
statement on the Microsoft-Yahoo arrangement, suggesting the strategic
relationship might be bad for competition.
Microsoft and Yahoo said this week a strategic tie-up in would see
Yahoo use Microsoft’s Bing search engine on its sites and share
advertising revenue from search sales with the Redmond software
giant.
The deal has unusual implications for the Australian market, where both
Yahoo and Microsoft operate joint-ventures, through Yahoo7 and Ninemsn
respectively.
The ACCC will not comment on current investigations – as the
Microsoft/Yahoo proposal is now classified – but it is thought that it
will look at whether there is an advertising impact through media concentration in
addition to its search implications.
Google issued a statement suggesting the Microsoft/Yahoo deal might harm competition – but saying it was too early to tell.
“There has traditionally been a lot of competition online, and our
experience is that competition brings about great things for users,”
the Google statement said. “We're interested to learn more about the
deal.”
Google Australia officials declined to comment directly on the
implications of the deal for the local market, not whether there were
any special considerations inAustralia as a result of the two
joint-venture arrangements.
The Yahoo7 and Ninemsn joint-ventures are unusual for both companies, but they are not unique.
Analysts will be watching the treatment of the Bing arrangements by
Alibaba.com, the China-based B2B e-commerce website. China is a market
market where Google doesn’t dominate search in the way in deos in the
West.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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