FTC Looking into Google-Apple Ties

The Federal Trade Commission is examining whether the fact Apple and Google share two board members violates antitrust laws.

It’s no secret that Apple and Google have been on fairly friendly terms over the last few years: a few examples include the iPhone tying in with services like YouTube and Google Maps as soon as it became available, and Google’s Chrome browser being based on WebKit, the same KHTML-derived codebase that Apple uses for its own Safari Web browser.

That overlap extends the the companies’ boards of directors too, where both Google and Apple share two people: Eric Schmidt, currently Google CEO, and Arthur Levinson, former Genentech CEO. However, the Clayton Antitrust Act (which dates back to 1914) prohibits someone from serving on the boards of two companies if their presence would decrease competition between those companies. Although Google and Apple are pals on some levels, they are also competitors: for instance, both companies offer a range of mobile communications services, and Google’s Android mobile platform is increasingly looking to challenge Apple’s iPhone in the smartphone marketplace.

To that end, the a href=”http://www.ftc.gov”>Federal Trade Commission has launched a formal inquiry into whether the ties between the companies’s boards violate antitrust laws. Although the provision of th Clayton Act that deals with overlaps in company boards is rarely enforced, the New York Times reports that the FTC has notified both companies that it is looking into the matter. In the past, when potential problems have arisen, an individual involved has usually choses to resign from the board of one of the companies, eliminating the potential conflict of interest.