Google is being pressed by Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jonathan Leibowitz to offer to resolve the agency’s antitrust investigation in the next few days or face a lawsuit, two people familiar with the matter said.
Google has been in discussions with the agency for about two weeks and hasn’t put any remedy proposals on the table, said the people, who declined to be identified because the negotiations are private.
For almost 20 months, the FTC has been probing whether Mountain View, Calif.-based Google is abusing its dominance of the Internet, and it’s prepared to sue if the operator of the world’s largest search engine fails to make an acceptable proposal, the people said.
The FTC has told Google it won’t accept a resolution short of a consent decree and is prepared to take action in the next week or two, one of the people said.
“We continue to work cooperatively with the Federal Trade Commission and are happy to answer any questions they may have,” Adam Kovacevich, a spokesman for Google, said in an e- mail. Peter Kaplan, a spokesman for the FTC, declined to comment.