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Was the Deal with Google Just a Yahoo Ploy?

From the Washington Post:

Reuters reports that a planned ad deal between Yahoo and Google (NSDQ: GOOG), which just last week was made to sound like an inevitability, might not be quite so done. Now that Yahoo doesn’t have Microsoft breathing down its neck, the urgency to use a partnership as a poison pill has been reduced. And speaking of this strategy, law professor Stephen Bainbridge offers an analysis of this question: can a company actually use a partnership agreement to thwart a takeover? It’s not cut and dry, but a key question is whether the agreement was made as part of a long-term business strategy, or whether the move was clearly designed to prevent a takeover. Certainly the idea of outsourcing search ads to Google had been talked about for some time, but Microsoft’s bid definitely brought urgency to this question.