Earlier today, BoomTown reported that Yahoo was poised to name a few new top execs at its Silicon Valley HQ.
But the company has also hired a new director of public affairs in the nation’s capital–Amber Allman of 463 Communications.
With a spate of regulatory issues coming up around its pending search and online advertising deal with Microsoft, Yahoo will need all the help it can get.
Yahoo and Microsoft are poised to finally sign the definitive agreement that will govern the complex and far-reaching search and online advertising partnership they struck in late July, said sources close to the situation.
If all goes well, the various Microsoft and Yahoo execs–who have been ferreted away over the last weeks, busy dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s in the massive document–could even turn in the delayed deal homework to their bosses for signature by the end of the week.
Yesterday, BoomTown wrote about the status of the regulatory investigation for the Microsoft-Yahoo search and online advertising pact, which most expect to get approved.
One of the few vocal critics of the deal, though, is Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public interest group, who lobbed MicroHoo some important questions.
Here are the answers.
Unlike the gripping back and forth of the fight over Yahoogle last year, the approval process for the search and online advertising partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo is chugging along slowly but surely as the Justice Department has deepened its investigation by reaching out to a broad range of publishers, advertisers, public interest groups and rivals for comment recently.
But, so far, there is still no significant external challenge to the MicroHoo deal, even from Google, the likeliest company to try to scuttle or, at the very least, slow down the deal.
In other words: Zzzzzzzzzzz…
Although it is not a particular surprise, because Microsoft and Yahoo execs had previously said they expected as much, the Justice Department lobbed in a “second request” for information about the search and online advertising partnership the pair struck earlier this summer.
A Microsoft spokesman confirmed the request to BoomTown.
“As expected Microsoft and Yahoo received an additional request about the agreement, as we said when this agreement was announced,” said Microsoft’s Jack Evans. “We anticipated this deal would be closely reviewed and we continue to be hopeful that it will be approved by early 2010.”
After all the investor hubbub over the oh-no-they-didn’t deal between Yahoo and Microsoft starts to die down a bit, the pair are now embarking on the path that is the only way toward proving the efficacy of them joining together.
That would be getting a variety of state, federal and international regulators to say yes to the wide-ranging online advertising and search arrangement they announced last week so they can start making it work.
According to sources at both companies, a variety of filings will be made this week, including one to the Securities and Exchange Commission that should provide more details of the partnership.
BoomTown is at the lovely Santa Clara Marriott in Silicon Valley at the 2009 Yahoo annual meeting, liveblogging the event, which should be spectacularly dull.
Here is a rundown of what went on.
10:05 am: The meeting kicks off with a little video presentation with various and sundry television talking heads saying “Yahoo” in quick succession.
Actually, this was the year during which all of those hype-magnets repeated “Twitter” so many times that it has began to make my ears bleed.
But I like the spirit of trying to make Yahoo seem relevant and innovative again.
The Microsoft antitrust trial seems like a distant memory, doesn’t it?
Not quite yet to the Justice Department, it seems, which asked the federal judge overseeing the 2002 settlement with federal and state regulators yesterday to extend her oversight of some of the judgment another 18 months.
The Justice Department said it wants that extended to make sure Microsoft fully complies with the requirement that technical documentation to licensees is crackerjack.
Today, for interested lawyers, the American Bar Association is hosting a “brown bag” lunch and discussion in Washington, D.C. on the now-scuttled Google/Yahoo deal.
Ominously titled: THE GOOGLE/YAHOO! AGREEMENT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE ANTITRUST ENFORCEMENT IN ONLINE ADVERTISING, the gathering could not come at a more perfect time, given that comScore’s 2008 Digital Year In Review report, released yesterday, showed the power of Google at an all-time high, no matter how much Yahoo-chasing, lawyer-rattling and lobbying Microsoft has done.
When reports came out last week that Google and Yahoo were downsizing their controversial search advertising deal, I told a Yahoo exec I happened to be having dinner with that that it was the surest sign that the search giant was about to dump the long-suffering Internet portal.
The exec, who made the case that the deal was always tactical and not strategic, laughed. For all its problems, Yahoo has always been a straight-up player and such sneaky machinations are not its strong suit.
Google, not so much.
Are Google and Yahoo thinking of walking away from their controversial search advertising deal, as reported in an amusingly hedged report in The Wall Street Journal last night?
I would bet my Barry Manilow record collection, based on rumblings on Wednesday among those close to the case, that Google is a key whispery source here, sending a very public signal to the Justice Department that it would walk if pushed too far and leave regulators with egg on their faces for not letting the search giant help the struggling Yahoo.
The election is not the only event with only days to go–a move in face-off Yahoo and Google are in with the Justice Department over their controversial search advertising partnership will have an outcome, sources close to all sides said, before the next President is chosen.
Thus, I predict news either Friday or Monday.
So–at this point–BoomTown feels it is not untoward in asking: What the heck is taking so long for Yahoo and AOL to decide whether or not to merge their struggling operations?
And, after talking to a dozen sources, inside and outside both companies, this week, I can tell you there is definitely one nagging problem: They’re just not that into each other.
Make no mistake, though, these arranged marriage negotiations are grudgingly advanced. Oh, they are talking, and how, now engaged in what another source describes as “very serious due diligence.”
BoomTown was a squeaky enough wheel to get Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to grant a long interview by phone yesterday–just a day after he had announced weak third-quarter earnings results for the Internet giant, caught as others are in the econalypse, as well as layoffs of at least 10 percent of its global workforce.
But instead of being glum, as you might expect, especially after a year of corporate turmoil that would have finally gotten to even Job, Yang sounded surprisingly confident that Yahoo would emerge a winner after all the wrenching change is wrought at the company he co-founded.
Here is the second of two parts.
BoomTown was a squeaky enough wheel to get Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to grant a long interview by phone yesterday–just a day after he had announced weak third-quarter earnings results for the Internet giant, caught as others are in the econalypse, as well as layoffs of at least 10 percent of its global work force.
But instead of being glum, as you might expect, especially after a year of corporate turmoil that would have finally gotten to even Job, Yang sounded surprisingly confident that Yahoo would emerge a winner after all the wrenching change is wrought at the company he co-founded.
Here is the first of two parts.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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