"The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes." --New York Times
IT HAS BEEN argued for quite some time now (by several independent experts in fact) that the Yahoo!-Microsoft deal would not go ahead without major interference [1, 2, 3]. Now that Microsoft's vassal at Yahoo! admits that she would have sold Yahoo! to Microsoft, antitrust regulators in the United States look more closely at the deal. Sadly, as it's the Department of 'Justice' [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] which does the review, we already know that Microsoft insiders will be among the deciders.
And in a CNBC interview Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says she would have accepted the Microsoft takeover offer that then CEO Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board rejected. (That would have had a tougher time with regulators than the search-only deal now before them.) Bartz also asserted that Yahoo was still in the search business by controlling the search experience around Bing results
The US Department of Justice has expanded its review of the Microhoo search pact.