The biggest thing since Youtube’s acquisition by Google last year has just hit the intertubes like a storm. The hostile move by Microsoft to acquire Yahoo.

Everybody is talking about the consequences that this 44.6 billion dollar deal will have on the web. The obvious concerned party by this bid is Google who already made a very aggressive statement about the monopolistic nature of Microsoft and how they would potentially use Yahoo web assets to threaten Google’s in several business niches that Google leads undisputed, like the web advertising market.

But Google went beyond issuing a public statement, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company’s help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.

Google can’t contemplate the idea of fighting a bidding war for Yahoo against Microsoft, not only because Microsoft would probably outbid them in the end, but also because anti-monopoly laws would make Google’s bid a legal mess.

But a corporation as large as Google has a few cards in the sleeves, and according to the New York Times:

Google’s lobbyists in Washington have also begun plotting how it might present a case against the transaction to lawmakers, people briefed on the company’s plans said. Google could benefit by simply prolonging a regulatory review until after the next president takes office.

In addition, several Google executives made “back-channel” calls over the weekend to allies at companies like Time Warner, which owns AOL, to inquire whether they planned to pursue a rival offer and how they could assist, these people said. Google owns 5 percent of AOL.

It seems that this will be a long and hard war to be No. 2 on the web. Yahoo employees seem to be worried about losing their corporate identity and be engulfed by Redmond’s money making machine.

The timing for the bid seems to be perfect, just when everyone had their eyes set on the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday election for the President of the United States.

As a user of web services from both companies (Hotmail and Flickr) I find all this quite amusing and concerning at the same time. Anyway this seems to be a Borg takeover where resistance is indeed futile.