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Before Friday, recently coronated Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes had planned to get Time Warner out of the Internet access business entirely, lowering its stake in Time Warner Cable and somehow disposing of AOL's dialup business. He could then, at his leisure, consider an ad partnership between Time Warner's AOL and Microsoft or Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal speculates. But Friday saw Microsoft offer $44.6 billion to buy Yahoo. An analyst at T. Rowe Price said that news leaves Bewkes with one place to turn: Google.

Don't expect a merger, though. History shows Google would prefer to partner with content sites on the Internet while focusing its own resources on creating new ad products. But if AOL needs help monetizing its massive inventory of display advertising, Google would jump at the chance to broaden their partnership beyond search. The only problem: Much of AOL's value, Time Warner believes, lies in its own ad-network business, recently renamed Platform A. And Google's purchase of DoubleClick, expected to be approved by European authorities this month, puts it solidly in competition with AOL.