Yahoo!/Microsoft: Not Such a Bad Deal for Yahoo! After All?
by Berin Szoka on August 3, 2009 · 4 comments
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.
Berin Szoka / Berin is the founder of TechFreedom. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation and Director of PFF's Center for Internet Freedom. He covers Internet and media policy issues including privacy, advertising, neutrality, cybersecurity, free speech, child safety, and various other efforts to regulate the Net.
Berin was elected in 2010 to the Steering Committee of the DC Bar Association's Computer & Telecommunications Law Section. Before joining PFF, he practiced communications, Internet and satellite law as an Associate in the Communications Practice Group at Latham & Watkins LLP. Previously, he practiced at Lawler Metzger, a boutique telecommunications law firm in Washington and clerked for the late Hon. H. Dale Cook, Senior U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Oklahoma.
A recognized expert on the legal and regulatory issues associated with space commercialization, Berin is a member of the FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC). He is a Director, and former Chairman, of the Space Frontier Foundation, a citizens' advocacy group founded in 1988 and dedicated to opening the space frontier by enabling "NewSpace."
He received his Bachelor's degree in economics from Duke University and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served as Submissions Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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