Sniffing the presence of that exotic - but not exactly uncommon - fauna known in antitrust law as an interlocking directorate, the Federal Trade Commission has opened a "confidential" inquiry into the composition of the boards of Apple and Google, according to the New York Times.

The companies share two directors, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, and Schmidt's seat on the Apple board has always seemed odd to everybody.

Anyway, regulators frown on such things when the companies involved are close competitors and when one of them makes more than 2% of its revenues off the space in which they compete.

It's assumed Apple and Google's cell phone interests raised a flag with the FTC, especially since Google wants to corner the mobile ad space. They also have competing browsers.

The Obama administration - despite the close ties between Schmidt and the president - has apparently noticed the power Google has amassed because this is the second antitrust investigation involving Google to have surfaced in as many weeks.

The Justice Department is looking into the Google Book Search settlement giving it copyright licenses to millions of digitized books. The DOJ threatened to sue Google for antitrust last year if it went ahead with that deal it cut to sell advertising for Yahoo.