The CEO of Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, has said that he is open to merging AOL with another company in “whatever configuration makes it the strongest and the most valuable”, reports The New York Times. The claim comes a week after talks between AOL and Yahoo! reportedly stepped up, as Yahoo! attempts to fend off Microsoft’s US$44.6 billion acquisition attempt. Yahoo! is believed to be pursuing talks with Time Warner, to possibly roll AOL’s Internet operations into Yahoo!, in return for Time Warner acquiring a large minority stake in the merged entity. Speaking at the annual Bear Sterns Media conference, Bewkes said Time Warner is also looking to bulk up its business units, at the same time as cutting expenses. Mobile Business Briefing reported yesterday that Yahoo! is now unlikely to find a partner in News Corp, following comments from the media company’s Chairman Rurpert Murdoch that it does not want to “get into a fight with Microsoft.”

Meanwhile analysts believe that Google’s US$3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick – approved this week by the European Commission – could turn out to be a double-edged victory for the US search company. “The Google-DoubleClick deal makes the regulatory part of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal easier,” analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates told Dow Jones Newswires. “Google will have a hard time arguing that the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal is anticompetitive, given how much of the online ad market Google will be able to corner with the now-approved acquisition of DoubleClick.”