Is Oracle In The Justice Departments Crosshairs Again?
In May, Christine Varney, the new antitrust chief at the Justice Department, promised to scrutinize high-tech mergers more closely than her Bush-era predecessors. In the early Obama administration, talk of a possible antitrust action has focused almost exclusively on Google. The latest example is this Sunday Times profile of the apple-cheeked Googler whose job it is to furiously spin decision makers on the idea that Google is not really so big after all. But that’s not the only antitrust issue lurking. If the recession, the energy bill, the prospects for health care, and a dozen other stories weren’t already dominating headlines, yesterday’s news that the Justice Department is taking a closer look at Oracle’s $7.4-billion purchase of Sun would be a really big deal. The antitrust arguments against Google are fairly well known (I wrote about them in a Washington context here). The Sun-Oracle dispute isn’t nearly as familiar, partly, I suspect, because it doesn’t involve “consumer-facing
