Google’s Waze acquisition to face FTC antitrust review

We told you previously that Google’s acquisition of mapping company Waze could be in trouble due to some questionable filing tactics and today Google confirmed that the purchase will indeed face an antirust review by the FTC (via The Wall Street Journal):

Google on Saturday confirmed that it has been contacted by lawyers from the Federal Trade Commission over the company’s $1.1 billion acquisition of the mobile navigation company Waze, which closed in mid-June.

The FTC would have to determine whether Waze would have become a head-to-head competitor with Google, whose Google Maps software is the dominant digital mapping and navigation service around the world, or whether there is any evidence, such as emails, that showed Google wanted to acquire the company only to keep it from rivals.

As noted by the WSJ, “Waze’s revenue was too low to trigger an automatic review by the agency,” but it is able to review the purchase after it’s closed.

When Google announced the acquisition earlier this month, it said Waze would continue to operate in Israel separate from the Google Maps team, but that Google would integrate its search technology into Waze products and possibly Waze’s timely road corrections and updates in Google Maps. The short term result of the review for Google, according to the report, is the “the FTC may have asked Google not to integrate with Waze” until the review is complete.