Just in case you want to read about the battle of the giants, Here's the stories and links from Mediapost today:
Icahn Moves Forward With Proxy Battle
Financial Times
Carl Icahn launched his proxy fight against the Yahoo board in a letter to chairman Roy Bostock on Thursday. Icahn said Yahoo "had completely botched" negotiations with Microsoft, and listed 10 replacements to stand against the board at the company's annual shareholder meeting on July 3. Icahn said he would move forward with a proxy battle unless Yahoo agreed to sell to Microsoft for $33 per share, which he described as a superior option for shareholders than remaining independent. However, Microsoft, as yet, has given no indication that it still wants to purchase Yahoo.
Meanwhile, the billionaire investor continues to up his stake in the Web giant: In the letter, Icahn confirmed that he's purchased more than 59 million Yahoo shares during the past 10 days-around 4% of the company-and was now seeking clearance from the FTC to up his stake to $2.5 billion of Yahoo stock, or 7% of the company. Hedge Fund Paulson & Co also revealed that it bought more than 50 million Yahoo shares in support of Icahn.
Later Thursday, Yahoo's Bostock issued a response to Icahn's letter clearly stating that the company's board does not believe it's in the best interest of shareholders to wage a proxy battle "for the express purpose of trying to force a sale of Yahoo to a formerly interested buyer who has publicly stated that they have moved on." - Read the whole story...
A 'Benedict Arnold' In Icahn's Board
D: All Things Digital
Only one name in the "amazingly Internet-experience-free" proxy slate served up by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, actually has a lot of related Web experience, said BoomTown's Kara Swisher, and that would be Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, the man who sold Broadcast.com to-yes-Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999.
A man with an impeccable sense of timing, Cuban sold the Internet broadcasting company a year after its "faux blockbuster" IPO, just as its shares were starting to slip. Then, just before the Internet bubble burst in 2000, Cuban unloaded all his Yahoo stock, becoming one of the biggest Web 1.0 success stories. Broadcast.com, meanwhile, never became much of anything; it's now just another domain that redirects to Yahoo.com.
It's sweet irony indeed that Cuban should now come back to Yahoo as "the only major Internet figure apparently willing to turn on the iconic Yahoo CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang"-the very man who made Cuban a billionaire. As Swisher said, "Calling Benedict Arnold!" - Read the whole story...
Yahoo Seeks 'Open' Search Alliance
New York Post
Yahoo, which never seems to budge unless it's prodded to by some sort of crisis, is scrambling to sew up a Google search partnership now that Carl Icahn has announced his proxy battle for control of the Yahoo board. Sources allege that Yahoo hopes to announce a new deal within the next week, adding that it won't be an exclusive partnership with Google.
Instead, Yahoo plans to allow the major search providers like MSN, AOL, Ask.com and anyone else to bid for the right to serve Yahoo ads tied to keyword searches. Think of it as AdWords for search providers: Yahoo outsources to the system most likely to provide the best return on investment. DidIt.com chairman Kevin Lee said the arrangement would only provide the illusion of a level playing field. "Given the way the ecosystem is put together now, Google would probably be the winner in a vast majority of cases," he said. Media Link founder Michael Kassan agreed. "They can call it anything they want, but at the end of the day, it's still rigged so that Google wins every time," he said.
Three sources allege that Google General Counsel Kent Walker is charged with structuring the deal to minimize regulatory scrutiny. No matter what the arrangement, most critics agree that a Google-Yahoo partnership will command a thorough inspection, at the very least, given Google's dominance of the search market. - Read the whole story...
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