The Federal Trade Commission has launched a probe into whether there's any antitrust funny business going on between Google and Apple. The two companies share two board members, which the FTC suspects may be reducing competition between them. Both Apple and Google have been made aware of the investigation already, though neither has commented publicly on it.

Google and Apple may have started out in very different industries, but the two companies have slowly become both partners and competitors. Google continues to partner with Apple in creating and maintaining Google Maps for the iPhone, for example, but the advent of Android has pitted the two companies against each other in the mobile space. That's in addition to the availability of Safari and Chrome as competing Web browsers, too.

This has apparently come to the attention of the FTC, according to unnamed sources speaking to the New York Times. The two board members in question are Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, and thanks to the Clayton Antitrust Act, an individual cannot sit on the board of two competing companies if it might reduce competition between them.

Whether the two members' presence on both boards has indeed reduced competition is difficult to say, although the investigation comes just a couple of months after rumors broke that Google allegedly agreed not to use multitouch on the Android-capable G1 at Apple's request.

The investigation is reportedly in the early stages, so it may not turn out to be the drama bomb that some are expecting. However, if the FTC feels as if the "interlocking directorates" are causing a problem, Schmidt and Levinson could be forced to resign from one board or another (presumably, Schmidt would resign from Apple's).