• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 8, 2008

Yahoo's board will meet today to consider Microsoft's offer for the company, Techcrunch reports.

While the board might try to hold out for more money, or attempt to avoid a Microsoft merger by partnering with Google, many pundits are predicting Yahoo will ultimately capitulate.

Of course, that doesn't mean the deal is a sure thing. Antitrust authorities in the United States and Europe still need to vet the deal, and Google has indicated it intends to raise concerns about whether a Microsoft-Yahoo combination could result in an anticompetitive environment.

Some members of Congress have already expressed wariness about the deal. Within hours of the news of the offer becoming public, a hearing of the judiciary committee was scheduled for today -- though that has since been postponed.

Of course, any attempt by Google to form a search alliance with Yahoo also would be scrutinized, given Google's dominance in the search space. In fact, regardless of this deal, Google's vast market share is increasingly seen as a threat. The Washington Post this week reported that businessman Phil Davies saw his page rank drop as a result of a recent change to Google's algorithm, causing his sales and traffic to plunge. "It almost destroyed our business -- the amount of control that company has is frightening," Davies told the newspaper.

Still, it's not clear that the existence of two major search engines -- Google and Microsoft-Yahoo -- will prevent such situations. Consider, a Chinese dissident, Guo Quan, is threatening to sue both Google and Yahoo for dropping his name from their search results in China.

Google and other search engines can legitimately argue that they're not run by the government and, therefore, have no First Amendment obligation to refrain from censorship. At the same time, for many publishers, the reality is if they don't appear in search results, they may as well not exist.

For that reason, the case can be made that the presence of at least three companies fighting for a share of the search market goes a long way toward encouraging free speech. And the consolidation now in progress could result in a major threat to it.