European antitrust regulators will approve Google's $3.1 billion DoubleClick acquisition later this week, the Financial Times reports. Expect Google's top lawyer David Drummond to soon turn up the heat on Microsoft-Yahoo. Before the EU finally approved Google-DoubleClick, Drummond had reason to stay relatively quiet as the new company formed by Microsoft-Yahoo would obviously create real competition for Google. But with EU approval in hand, that incentive is finished. Last fall, Google CEO Eric Schmidt credited Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with slowing down Google-DoubleClick in Washington and abroad. Think he isn't eager to set his own suits on the attack?

News.com reporter Elinor Mills flew across the country to interview Google CEO Eric Schmidt on all sorts of topics: search, advertising, Yahoo-Microsoft, and the ostensible reason for the interview, Google Health. Newly installed editor-in-chief Dan Farber writes: "A few minutes before the interview, she was told by a Google spokesman that Schmidt would only answer questions about Google Health." That's not very Googly.

Missed earnings, recession fears, and dodgy deals are eviscerating the stock portfolios of tech titans like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. Here's the damage.

In March 2007, Yahoo named Reggie Davis its vice president of marketplace quality. The headlines hailed him as Yahoo's new "click fraud czar." Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics, a search-marketing researcher, told CNET the move signaled "Yahoo is taking a more honest approach" to fighting click fraud." So what does it say about Yahoo's "honest approach" now that a tipster tells us Davis got the pink slip?

When Eric Schmidt looks at Baidu, he doesn't see a China-grown website that accounts for 61 percent of search traffic because of its ease of use and mastery of the native tongue, as Baidu founder Robin Li claims. Instead, Schmidt sees a search engine beating the poo out of Google China because of its ease of use in downloading MP3s. (Nearly 100 percent of digital music downloads in China are unlicensed.) Schmidt's response?

A source inside Yahoo says the company is reconsidering a previously discussed business partnership with Google as an alternative to Microsoft's $44 billion hostile takeover offer. Yahoo believes that offer, at $31 a share, significantly undervalues the company. Private equity firms and News Corp. have been named as other possible suitors for Yahoo, but neither are seen as realistically able to get a deal together. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Google CEO Eric Schmidt called Yahoo cofounder and CEO Jerry Yang to offer Google's help in thwarting an unwanted Microsoft takeover of Yahoo.

Fortune has revealed a pact made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The three agreed, in 2004, to work together for 20 years. Two decades is an unbelievably long time in the technology world. And the thought of Schmidt still wandering the halls of the Googleplex and flying around the world chasing skirts at the age of 69 is harrowing. But the pact, no doubt strategically leaked, has a useful purpose: It reminds Google's executives and rank and file that Schmidt, as much as they might wish otherwise, isn't going anywhere. The pluses and minuses of that?

In December Internet evangelist Vint Cerf promised that Eric Schmidt would furnish any inquiring journalist with an official statement within an hour, regardless of where the Google CEO happened to be. Well, that was a lie. And Cerf now admits it. Google Blogoscoped, which originally unearthed the pledge, diligently awaited Schmidt's reply for over a month. Fed up, it asked Cerf why Schmidt had dissed the blog. "Rapid responses might only reasonably be expected for on-the-record corporate policy questions," said Cerf. Corporate policy, such as the speed with which the CEO will respond to questions?

NASA could learn a thing or two from open source software such as Linux and MySQL, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday, according to PC World. Speaking at event to mark the space agency's 50th anniversary yesterday, Schmidt told the crowd, "assume that you don't have all the answers." (If only Schmidt would apply that lesson to himself.)

We like to think Google CEO Eric Schmidt helped hand out these test tubes filled with vodka and cranberry juice at last night's party to officially open Google's new 31,000 sq. ft. Washington, D.C. offices. That's probably not the case. But even so, the Washingtonian notes there was at least food — coconut shrimp and mini-burgers — as well as games like foosball and Guitar Hero. Which can't be right, unless online ad spending has fallen faster than we've been warned it would. 'Cause nobody who's anybody plays Guitar Hero, anymore, Google. It's Rock Band or nothing.

Google's mobile operating system Android is a bad idea, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the New York Times after yesterday's keynote at Macworld. "Having created a phone, it's a lot harder than it looks," he said. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt should be happy with the apps they've created for the iPhone. "I actually think Google has achieved their goal without Android, and I now think Android hurts them more than it helps them. It's just going to divide them and people who want to be their partners."

"Google's Search Party," Ken Auletta's 6,264-word opus on the search engine's grudging embrace of D.C. lobbying, has proved tough to condense. Until I reread it again this weekend, and realized it can be boiled down to the final observation made by CEO Eric Schmidt:

Buried deep in Ken Auletta's magnum opus on Google in the New Yorker: Half of Apple's board of directors are either Google board members or senior advisors to the company. Is there a better example of Silicon Valley's inbred power circles? The overlappers: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Genentech CEO Art Levinson, both on Google's and Apple's board; and Google advisors Bill Campbell, the chairman of Intuit, and Al Gore, the former VP turned venture capitalist, both of whom serve on Apple's board. One wonders how Apple manages to have a board meeting these days, given Google's broad reach into markets of interest to Apple, like cell phones, online video, and Web applications.

The Google founders' Gulfstream V party plane — quick plane-spotting tip: the Gulfstream V has six windows; the IV only has five — took off on a scientific mission to study the Quadrantid meteor shower Thursday. Larry, Sergey and Eric, you may remember, got permission to park their jets at NASA's Moffett Field for the bargain basement price of $1.3 million plus allowing NASA to use the planes for "science missions." This is the first one we know about. Wait, just how many jets do they have?

The New York Times got tons of quotes but little information out of Google CEO Eric Schmidt for a piece on the company's competition with Microsoft. So what's a fancy blog like the Times to do? Add to the empty verbiage by reprinting an equally gassy email from Schmidt on management. Here it is, helpfully boiled down to the almost nothing it was to begin with.

The New York Times spent an epic 3,800 words on a truth known to everyone in Silicon Valley: Google is competing with Microsoft in email and productivity apps. Steve Lohr got lots of time with Google CEO Eric Schmidt — but attributes his failure to get any good quotes from Schmidt to Schmidt's caginess. Here's a version that skips the useless talking points from Microsoft and Google and just gets down to the scant few numbers Lohr managed to assemble. Bottom line: Microsoft doesn't have much to worry about. Yet. Lohr doesn't note this stat: 73 percent of consumers surveyed by NPD have noever even heard of Google Apps.

Golly, Dr. Schmidt! I know you're busy being the CEO of Google, but your chief Internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, promised me that no matter where you were in the world, you would be ready within an hour to provide an official statement to any journalist who asked for one. And I believed him, because he invented the Internet. And why couldn't you? I mean, you took the lead in promoting the Java language at Sun Microsystems. You were the CEO of Novell, and everyone said that company was going to die, but here it is, still limping along! And you made all those great decisions at Google, even though no one there can quite pin down for me what they were. Why, gosh, you're even donating a transit hub to the folks on Nantucket! Is there nothing you can't do?

It's not that we're appalled by married Eric Schmidt's role as Google's adulterer supervision. Rather, we're amazed. Impressed, even. Where does the man find the time? Though he's broken up with Marcy Simon, the girlfriend he gave a PR job in Google's New York office, we hear he's now squiring Kate Bohner around. Including, publicly, to one of the presidential debates Google's YouTube site has been running with CNN. We don't think this relationship will last very long, either. Just watch this video to see why.

Marcy Simon, the publicist romantically linked with Eric Schmidt, has broken up with the Google CEO. We wouldn't take such interest in Schmidt's affairs, if they didn't make him obsessed with privacy and prone to making foolish hires — such as the time he installed Simon as a PR consultant in Google's New York office. A messy breakup with his wife, Wendy, would also put his considerable stake in Google in play, which would seem to make keeping an eye on Schmidt's wandering one well worth investors' while.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are more "virtuous" than Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Guardian's Alexander Chancellor blathers. Why? Because while the prince purchased a new Airbus A380, which some call a flying mansion, Page and Brin "don't have private jets" and "own nothing more flashy than a modest Toyota Prius."