U.S. Probes Cable for Limits on Online Video

(Reuters) - The Justice Department has begun an anti-trust probe into whether cable companies are acting improperly to hurt nascent competition from online video, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Justice Department officials have talked to several online video providers, including Netflix Inc and Hulu, which is jointly owned by News Corp, Walt Disney Co and Comcast Corp, the paper said. ...

The Justice Department has begun an anti-trust probe into whether cable companies are acting improperly to hurt nascent competition from online video, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar ...

(Reuters) - The Justice Department has begun an anti-trust probe into whether cable companies are acting improperly to hurt nascent competition from online video, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The US Federal Trade Commission is poised to open a formal antitrust probe into whether Internet search giant Google has abused its dominance on the Web, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.The newspaper, citing "people familiar with the matter," said the FTC is preparing to serve Google with civil subpoenas "signaling the start of a wide-ranging, formal antitrust investigation."

The Justice Department is looking at whether Comcast and other pay-TV operators are engaging in practices that could derail or hold back competition from such broadband distributors as Netflix.A wide-ranging government probe into the pay-television industry could ultimately lead to dramatic changes in the way consumers receive video content on their television sets as well as on tablets and mobile phones.

The U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation to see whether cable companies are intentionally try to hurt the growth of Internet-based TV providers in order to preserve their own monopolies. In the past several years, as web-based video companies like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix (NFLX), Yahoo (YHOO), and others [...]

At issue is whether caps on Internet data use imposed by cable companies are anticompetitive because they limit access to online video - and thus force consumers to have cable subscriptions.

Google has been forced by regulators in the US to agree to legally binding changes to the way it presents some search results and runs its search advertising following nearly two years of investigation. But the internet search engine was exonerated of bias to push down competitors in its search results, leaving it untroubled by any government threat.