UK: Google’s £2B acquisition of Looker faces competition probe

Britain’s competition watchdog on Monday, December 2, announced it was probing Google’s US$2.6 billion buyout of privately held big-data analytics firm Looker Data Sciences, reported The Financial Times. 

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) stated it was considering whether the deal could hurt competition in the UK or other markets and invited comments on the acquisition until December 20.

Alphabet-owned Google announced the cash deal in June, the first major acquisition for its new cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian. The deal would build upon Google Cloud’s BigQuery, a tool for managing large datasets.

“While we deepen the integration of Looker into Google Cloud Platform (GCP), customers will continue to benefit from Looker’s multi-cloud functionality,” Mr Kurian said in June.

The CMA’s feedback request comes after it emerged this weekend that the European Commission was looking at Google’s data collection practices more broadly. The Commission sent out questionnaires to Google’s rivals about how the search engine gathers data and makes money from it. 

Full Content: Financial Times

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