The US Justice Department has asked Microsoft and Yahoo! for more information about their proposed partnership in search results and related advertising, showing antitrust officials are giving full scrutiny to the deal.

The two companies have portrayed the arrangement as a way to compete more solidly with Google, but had anticipated a deep antitrust inquiry and had not predicted that the deal would close before next year.

Yahoo! said nothing in the new request pushed their closing date past “early next year”, the timeframe it gave when the deal was announced.

The European Union is less concerned over this deal because a Microsoft-Yahoo! combination would have a smaller share of the market for search results in Europe, at about 10 per cent. Brazil, Taiwan and South Korea must also assess the deal’s impact.– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)