Like many others, I’ve wondered whether Yahoo! got less than it should have becuase government antitrust regulators prevented Google from bidding up the value of a deal with Yahoo!.
Carl Icahn, who owns 5% of Yahoo! seems happy enough while others still wonder if Microsoft got the better end of the deal, BusinessWeek reports. While many observers have howled that Yahoo! gets revenue-sharing instead of cash up front, Yahoo! Carol Bartz notes that a cash deal “would have had significant tax consequences while contributing only $3 million in annual interest to Yahoo’s bottom line.”
Whatever the initial terms of the deal, its value depends on speedy approval without onerous conditions being imposed by antitrust regulators—even if they take the form of “voluntary” concessions. Let’s hope the government gets out of the way to give this new partnership a real chance to go toe-to-toe with Google in search, as I’ve suggested here, here and especially here.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.