The UK formally announced a merger probe into Google’s US$2.6bil takeover of Looker Data Sciences Inc a week after its antitrust watchdogs raised concerns about Amazon.com Inc’s purchase of a minority stake in Deliveroo.

The Competition and Markets Authority said in a Dec 16 statement it will verify whether the Alphabet Inc unit’s acquisition might substantially weaken competition.

The CMA said it set a Feb 13 deadline to take a decision in this first phase review. The companies were told about the merger inquiry yesterday.

The British competition regulator is taking a tough look a technology deals. UK watchdogs last week threatened Amazon with an extended competition review of its Deliveroo deal unless the e-commerce giant addressed concerns that customers, restaurants and grocers would face higher prices.

Google announced in June that it planned to buy US-based Looker for its cloud unit, which lags far behind Amazon and Microsoft Corp with just 4% of the cloud-computing infrastructure market as of 2018, according to the most-recent figures from analyst Gartner Inc. US regulators cleared the deal in November.

- Bloomberg