US Justice Department is imminently preparing a Google antitrust investigation

Google may soon face an antitrust investigation from the US Department of Justice pertaining to its search business and potentially other aspects of the company’s sprawling software and services empire, according to a late Friday evening report from The Wall Street Journal. The DOJ is said to have spent the past few weeks preparing for the probe, which could be a broad evaluation of the company for antitrust violations across its entire business.

Citing anonymous sources, the WSJ says the Federal Trade Commission will defer to the DOJ here, following an FTC case against the company in 2011 related to the placement of tracking cookies in Apple’s Safari browser. That case was resolved a year later with a $22.5 million civil penalty...

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