“WAN is also concerned that this deal would give Google unwarranted market power over important segments of online advertising. Advertisers will increasingly migrate to Google since they will see diminishing price advantages to advertising through Yahoo. Google has refused to allow Yahoo to show Google ads on the websites of new publishing partners it acquires after the deal is finalized - in other words, Google has imposed a condition that impedes one of Yahoo’s last remaining opportunities to compete with Google. What this means for newspapers is that Yahoo’s bids for their ad business will almost certainly be lower than they are today.”

Though the deal only covers north America, WAN says European newspapers would be directly harmed, too. The companies submitted the proposal to a voluntary 100-day review when they brokered the deal to avert Microsoft’s (NSDQ: MSFT) Yahoo takeover in June. But they say the project will kick in next month regardless of the anti-trust outcome, which they expect to be positive. WAN has previously clashed with Google over its refusal to adopt the ACAP standard for crawling news content. The newspapers have already bought in to Yahoo in a significant way, of course; a consortium of almost 200 US papers runs Yahoo ads.