Corporate raider Carl Icahn, who has purchased 4.3 percent of Yahoo and proposed a new slate of directors for its board, hates Microsoft's latest plan to purchase Yahoo's search marketing business or otherwise partner with Yahoo to gain control of it. "Microsoft is trying to get the milk without buying the cow, and if you look at Icahn's history, he has never been used that way," one of Icahn's secret stooges told CNBC. "He does not want to see Yahoo pushed into some joint venture with Microsoft and is not going to be used to push Yahoo into it." Icahn and like-minded shareholders favoring a Microsoft-Yahoo merger control at least 29 percent of Yahoo. They do not, however, control Microsoft.

Electronic Arts' original bid to acquire videogame maker Take-Two expired on Friday, but was renewed this morning. Despite Wall Street predictions to the contrary and a $1 billion cash infusion, EA did not raise its $25.74 a share offer for the company behind the Grand Theft Auto series. Analysts predicted EA would raise its bid above $30 a share and shareholders bought the hype, trading the Take-Two up to a $27.10 close on Friday. Take-Two CEO Ben Feder said that spike and a decline in the number of Take-Two shares tendered indicates shareholders recognize EA's offer "undervalues our company."

Over the weekend, Microsoft said it "raised with Yahoo an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo." Sources told Kara Swisher that the alternative deal is an acquisition or partnership to give Microsoft control over Yahoo's search marketing business. Yahoo would keep everything else — notably its display advertising business — and Microsoft would control 30 percent of the search market. Perhaps more importantly to Microsoft, it would prevent Google from controlling more than 80 percent of the market with its own Yahoo deal. In its statement, copied below, Microsoft said it reserves the right to change its mind about the deal. We are utterly unsurprised.

TechCrunch reports that CondeNet, the online arm of Condé Nast and the parent of Wired.com, has bought Ars Technica, a rival technology news site. But if the latest issue of Wired is any indication, that's not the only tech property that's moved to CondeNet recently. On page 24, Wired's June issue announces a new version of Webmonkey, a defunct site for Web developers, under a list of Wired.com features:

Old school ad agencies on Madison Avenue know and understand CBS, Inc. They've been selling its inventory to clients since 1928. So it's no wonder the ad agencies are so happy to see CBS take control over CNET, one of those Web properties everyone's saying they have to put money into. PaidContent rounded up the gushing and we've pared it down, below.

Under the wing of CBS, CNET CEO Neil Ashe will continue to earn his $700,000 salary. He'll also get a 100 percent bonus and, in the next 10 days, a long-term stock award of "not less than $1,625,000 per year," according to a 8-K CNET filed with the SEC yesterday. CNET CFO Zander Lurie will get such a stock award worth "not less than $1,000,000 per year."

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has written two letters in response to Carl Icahn's attempt to take over Yahoo's board. One addresses Yahoo employees and the other its senior management. Neither feature capitalization. Both suggest Carl Icahn's move to take over Yahoo's board "reflects a significant misunderstanding of the facts," which as Yang see's them are that he and Yahoo's board responded to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's merger proposal with "diligence" as well as "knowledge, experience and commitment." Funny how Yahoo's largest shareholders seem to disagree. Both of Yang's letters are copied below.

Roy Bostock, Yahoo's chairman of the board, has responded to corporate raider Carl Icahn. The one-word version: "Unfortunately." That word sums up so well the letter, Yahoo's hamhanded reply to Icahn, and the whole sorry mess. Bostock has a point: There has not been a written offer on the table since Yahoo rejected Microsoft in February, and so neither the current board nor Icahn's replacements have any proposed sale to consider.

Yahoo board chairman Roy Bostock has penned a response to billionaire investor Carl Icahn's verbose missive, who's trying to replace the Internet company's board with directors who favor a deal with Microsoft:

If CBS were to greenlight a TV series about life at a modern media giant, the director would find it hard to cast anyone but Quincy Smith as himself. Call it 60 Seconds, a version of the news show sped up for the Web. His $1.8 billion CNET buy is just the latest episode in the life of the fast-talking president of CBS Interactive. Smith is sui generis; the stereotype, which grates on him but fits, is that of a frenetic dealmaker. Last month, he said he was looking for "the next YouTube"; instead, he bought a company which, having been founded in 1992, is eight times older than the current incarnation of CBS. CBS handlers offered to have him speak to me; I accepted. In the middle of the mile-a-minute conversation-argument, I think we both wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into. A partial transcript — the most I was able to type out while trying to keep up with Smith's banter:

CNET has been eyed by Quincy Smith, CBS's hyperacquisitive online chief, long before he sealed a $1.8 billion deal to buy the company. As a banker at Allen & Co., CNET was his client. "At one point, he wrote this major presentation about how valuable content was," a tipster tells us. "The single example in it was CNET. It was basically his only idea." An unfair dig? Perhaps. There is little like CNET on the market — a pure play on professional online content worth $1.8 billion? It can't be found. But the lack of a direct competitor may have also been CNET's undoing — the mixed blessing that brought it under attack by activist investors and led it to CBS's waiting arms.

Lexico, the company behind reference sites like Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, has been acquired by also-ran search engine Ask.com, a unit of Barry Diller's IAC, for an undisclosed sum. It will mean an 11 percent boost in traffic for Ask and more revenue for Lexico's sites, as Google had cut a special deal with IAC for a higher revenue share than it would give to the likes of Dictionary.com. Possibly tipping their hand about future moves, Ask CEO Jim Safka told the AP the site was also looking to improve results related to health and entertainment, presumably through more acquisitions. The move comes after IAC's Barry Diller settled a fight with Liberty's John Malone, a major IAC shareholder, over plans to split the company into five different parts.

For Carl Icahn to earn a quick profit on Yahoo, snatching up 3.5 percent of the company at around $25 a share and then selling to Microsoft at $33, Microsoft executives have to play along. So far they aren't doing so. They've told Icahn they have "moved on" and do not plan to reconsider a Yahoo merger. Meanwhile, sources familiar with the matter — we're guessing Googlers eager to see Icahn's effort kiboshed — tell the Wall Street Journal that a Google-Yahoo search advertising deal, the one that drove Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer from the negotiating table in the first place, is now "more likely than not."

Shareholder activists Jana Partners and company got their way, sort of. CNET has new management, and in fact ownership: CBS, which will purchase CNET for $11.50 a share, or $1.8 billion. That's about $150 million more than Google paid for YouTube, but there is no buyer's remorse from CBS as of yet. "The acquisition will make CBS one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States," reads a statement from CBS, its traffic now fattened by visits to CNET sites CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, MP3.com, News.com, and UrbanBaby. CNET CEO Neil Ashe's internal email is copied below.

Months after rumors of its interest first surfaced, Comcast has officially bought Plaxo. Terms weren't disclosed, but we last heard that the price was rumored to be around $175 million. For now, Comcast is keeping Plaxo and its engineering team in place in Mountain View, giving the cable company a toehold in Silicon Valley. I briefly spoke to Plaxo marketing dude John McCrea, who outlined some possibilities for how Plaxo could apply social networking to Comcast's Web properties. John, sounds great, but I'd be happy if your engineers could just figure out how to connect my Comcast.net Internet ID with my Comcast.com billing account.

After acquiring 3.5 percent of Yahoo in the week after merger negotiations fell through with Microsoft, corporate raider Carl Icahn will move forward with a plan to replace the company's board with directors expected to be friendly to resuming negotiations. Icahn could announce the alternative slate as early as tonight, Reuters reports, citing sources familiar with the matter. Which means the Wall Street Journal could run a widely expected hit piece on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang as soon as tomorrow.

In explaining Carl Icahn's raid on Yahoo, pundits bring up his efforts to shake up tech and media giants like Motorola and Time Warner. But I think there's a better analogy in Icahn's past: TWA. Icahn's attempt to gain a board seat or broker a new deal to sell Yahoo to Microsoft will not send Yahoo soaring; if left unchecked, he will run Yahoo into the ground as surely as he did that troubled airline. Icahn's bid, and the support it is drawing from large Yahoo investors, seems premised on the notion that he can bring Microsoft and Yahoo back to the bargaining table. That seems unlikely.

Sending angry letters, going public with a hostile offer — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer played rough with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board during merger negotiations. Yahoo shareholders, dispirited by the failure of those negotiations, want corporate raider Carl Icahn to play rougher. Icahn purchased $1.3 billion worth of Yahoo only after large Yahoo shareholders contacted him and urged him to become involved, a source familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal. The man controlling the second largest portion of Yahoo shares, portfolio manager Bill Miller of Legg Mason, told the Journal he's glad Icahn joined the fray. "To the extent he can get the parties back to the table I'd be all in favor of that," Miller said. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)

Yahoo might merge with Microsoft whether the CEOs of either company like it or not. Since the merger fell apart last week, corporate raider Carl Icahn has purchased as many as 50 million shares in the company and now he's "leaning toward launching a proxy contest in an effort to push Yahoo back to the negotiating table," a person familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal. Microsoft sources say they have not given Icahn assurance that the company will purchase Yahoo, even at a more favorable price. In 2007, Icahn purchased 8.5 percent of BEA Systems, not long before the company first rejected and then agreed to a merger with Oracle.

Oakland-based custom online radio site Pandora, reeling from an increase in Web-radio royalty rates, could get purchased by national radio conglomerate Clear Channel. Expect your local alt-weekly to figure out a way to cry about the homogenization of programming on a site that creates custom playlists for users. [PaidContent]