Steve Ballmer and Carol Bartz are about to get the blessing of the Justice Department to get hitched.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Justice officials are expected within the next 20 days to 30 days to approve without conditions the search pact between Ballmer’s Microsoft and Bartz’s Yahoo!, with an announcement to coincide with an approval by the European Commission.
“There’s nothing coming of the DOJ investi gation,” the source said. “This is very easy.”
Justice officials and Microsoft declined to comment. Yahoo! did not return calls.
When it comes, the approval will cap what has been a long and pro tracted dance between two companies bent on taking on search king Google.
After months of wrangling, Yahoo! and Microsoft in July announced they would join forces, with Microsoft agreeing to take over Yahoo!’s search technology, saving Yahoo! the expense of having to invest in and operate its own search engine.
But hammering out a deal proved nearly as tough as getting the two sides to agree in principle to the pact itself. It wasn’t until December that Yahoo! and Microsoft settled on a final framework.
The Justice Department has been investigating the partnership since at least September, even before the two companies finalized their deal.
For Yahoo!, the OK comes just in the nick of time. Once a leader in search, Yahoo! has seen its market share shrink, as it loses share to both Google and Microsoft’s recently revamped search engine Bing.
In December, Yahoo!’s share stood at 17.3 percent, vs. 21 percent a year earlier. Microsoft, meanwhile, has seen its slice of the market grow to 10.7 percent from 8.5 percent. Google’s piece has swelled to 65.7 percent from 63 percent.
Microsoft and Yahoo! reached their agreement de spite calls from some Yahoo! shareholders for that company to get out of the search business because they felt the company couldn’t keep pace with Google’s rate of innovation and its deep pockets.
However, both Microsoft and Yahoo! argue that their combination will create a viable competitor to Google, which dominates the paid search market, even though the combo will still leave them with less than half of Google’s share of that segment.
Many of the largest ad firms have backed the deal. In October, the heads of the top ad firms — WPP, Publicis, Omnicom and Interpublic — sent a letter to the Justice Department urging quick approval of the merger.
However, even with Madison Avenue’s support, antitrust officials have scrutinized the deal because it would cut the number of search players to two from three.
Yahoo! has spent much time looking for a search partner, and first chose Google. But regulatory concerns prompted Google in 2008 to pull the plug on a proposed search pact with Yahoo!.
Microsoft had lobbied hard against the Yahoo!-Google search pact, as did the Association of National Advertisers.
Now Google has reportedly objected to this deal. josh.kosman@nypost.com