Relegation-threatened Fulham Football Club, currently second bottom of the Premier League, have come up with a survival plan. They want to buy Derby County.

OK, of course they don’t. But if the latest rumours about Yahoo are true, then maybe this is the sort of business precedent we can expect.

According to reports, Yahoo is considering a bid for AOL now that Time Warner has apparently decided to sell of much of the business that it was once acquired by for $164bn at the height of turn-of-the-century dot com madness.

So, to repel an unwanted takeover bid by Microsoft, ailing Yahoo decides to buy sickly AOL. If I was a Yahoo shareholder, I wouldn’t be inspired with confidence that this is the strategic plan to restore my stock valuation.

Let’s not forget, Yahoo has delivered eight straight quarters of disappointing financial results. It has lost share in online advertising when the rest of the market grew by about 25 per cent – and Google by even more. And the search firm’s stock price fell 40 per cent in the three months before Microsoft’s offer was announced.

As a shareholder, you’d need some convincing that this was a business going places, regardless of how big its customer base or how innovative its product development.

It is no surprise that Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s first bid – surely only us Brits accept the first price we are offered in a haggling contest. And investors clearly expect a higher offer, since Yahoo’s share price last week reached the value of Microsoft’s $31-per-share proposal. Yahoo’s newly-inflated stock value reflects only the expectation of a quick profit when Microsoft ups its bid. If Microsoft played the ultimate hardball and withdrew its offer completely, watch the Yahoo share price plummet.

"It's good negotiating tactics to try to get a higher price from Microsoft," Laura Martin from Soleil Securities Group told the San Jose Mercury News. "But if they really reject the offer they are going to have a litany of shareholder lawsuits. It's clear there are no other bidders for anything close to this price."

As far as profit-seeking Yahoo shareholders go, Microsoft’s bid is the only game in town. Buy AOL instead, and they simply wait another year or two before YahAOL goes the same way.

If you’re consumed by doubt over who killed President Kennedy, intrigued about whether or not the Pentagon was actually hit by a plane on 9/11, or if you’re still out to get Prince Philip for driving the white Fiat that took out Princess Diana, then the world of undersea cables is probably taking up a lot of your time at the moment.

Over the past week, four telecoms cables at the bottom of the sea connecting the Middle East and North Africa have “failed”, disrupting internet traffic and telecommunications – and hence electronic trade – in several countries across the region.

Broken undersea cables are, as you can imagine, not a frequent occurrence – but it does happen often enough to warrant a small fleet of repair ships ready to take action.

The unusual number and the particular geography of these problems have kept the internet conspiracists very happy.

First reports suggested that a trailing anchor had damaged a couple of co-located cables near Alexandria, until the Egyptian authorities denied the presence of any ships in that area.

Since then there have been suggestions of CIA dirty tricks, plans to spoil a new Iranian online oil exchange, or even botched attempts to install covert listening devices on the cables themselves.

Matt Walker, a senior analyst at Ovum RHK, gives a very good – and sensible - account of the likely circumstances:

“Of the four reported and confirmed failures, two are on cables in the Mediterranean, two in the Persian Gulf; at least one of these may be a power failure, not a cable cut, and hence the landing station is the likely culprit,’ he wrote.

“The Persian Gulf is shallow but the Mediterranean reaches depths of several kilometres not too far from the coast. Without knowing the exact depth of the Mediterranean outages, accidental damage from fishing/anchors/dredging is certainly possible there, and highly likely in the shallow Gulf. Four breaks in two separate locations in a single week are rare but hardly impossible, or proof of a conspiracy.

"To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, though, even the paranoid have enemies; there may indeed be something sinister lurking. Even if all the outages occurred in shallow water, that doesn't prove that accidental damage from, e.g., a fishing trawler, was the cause, but merely suggests it was physically possible. Intentional sabotage is, after all, probably more feasibly done in shallow waters than deep, and cable security in shallow waters is only modestly more practical. Clearly, undersea cables are a ripe target for those with an interest in wreaking havoc on international communications, whatever their motivation. Another consideration is that undersea cables have been used for submarine/surface surveillance purposes as far back as World War II, with the cooperation of private industry,” he said.

Walker concluded: “In my view, the most likely outcome of this is that a credible explanation for the coincidence will be presented soon, and a few weeks from now, all will be forgotten.”

Believe what you will. The most significant aspect of this incident is to highlight the critical importance that the internet plays in global trade, even in developing nations such as Egypt.

The fact that a temporary and relatively minor disruption to that service in a pressure-cooker region of the world has produced such an outburst of conspiratorial hand-wringing shows that the internet is well and truly as much a part of international relations and political diplomacy as it is central to the corporate IT strategy.

I would like to announce quite categorically that Computing has no plans to buy Yahoo.

Despite speculation around the office that our team might invest our beer fund and chip in a few quid each, I can now confirm we will not be making a bid for the internet firm. Microsoft, you can rest easy. We'll save that battle for another day.

I just wanted to make sure that readers are clear on our position, because over the next few days and weeks there will hardly be a large internet or media company that is not going to be linked - idly or otherwise - to some sort of purchase or alliance with Yahoo, now that the company is "in play" following Microsoft's $44.6bn hostile takeover bid.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, one of the world's biggest media companies and already owner of MySpace, said today: "We are definitely not going to make a bid for Yahoo." Join the club, Rupert.

But in Murdoch's case, his denial generated pages and pages of web and print copy around the globe leaving observers with a lingering memory that News Corporation was involved in the Yahoo deal somewhere, so it must be a major player in the internet world.  No doubt the likes of Disney and perhaps AT&T will similarly enter the fray in a very non-committal sort of way at some point too.

So will any media giants step in as a white knight for the beleaguered Yahoo? Well, if they need any sort of debt to finance it, and have to approach Wall Street for advice, try avoiding the mention of AOL Time Warner, the last great internet/media deal and perhaps one of the least successful corporate mergers of all time.

Then there is the credit crunch. There is little appetite for a heavily debt-financed acquisition in the financial markets, and although Microsoft has now said it may use a portion of debt to finance its bid, the software giant is so phenomenally cash rich that few companies are able to match the price offered for Yahoo.

Don't rule out Yahoo looking for minority investors - a determined 20 per cent shareholder could be enough to complicate Microsoft's plans - and the search firm will certainly be looking to shore up its future with alliances and partnerships with anybody who has a vested interest in stopping Microsoft - primarily Google of course.

But Microsoft has achieved phase one of its plan. Everyone wants to be linked to buying Yahoo - thus furthering the expectation of a deal - but few can compete with Redmond's cash pile.

The rumours have finally abated, and what was perhaps the raging inevitability of a Microsoft bid for Yahoo is now a reality.

The software giant today offered nearly $45bn for its internet rival. It also emerged that Yahoo rejected an acquisition approach from Microsoft in February last year, believing that its 2007 turnaround plans and the development of its Project Panama search advertising platform would be the basis for the company’s revival.

But when Yahoo announced earlier this week that annual profit was down 12 per cent, Microsoft decided to strike.

Last year, Yahoo was able to convince shareholders that it had a plan in place to deliver the necessary improvement on its stock price. Just 12 months later, those shareholders may be harder to convince when faced with cashing in on a 62 per cent premium on the current share value for Yahoo.

So, chances are the shareholders will say yes. Certainly it would take a very long-term investor to think they are willing to wait for Yahoo shares to increase 62 per cent.

Then it will come down to the regulators. US and European competition authorities will undoubtedly want to examine the deal.

In the US, Google’s planned acquisition of online advertising firm DoubleClick was closely examined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), before approving the deal in December last year. Microsoft will be heartened by that decision and will expect it to be seen as something of a precedent.

In Europe, the EU Competition Commission has a long and combative relationship with Microsoft over its dominant position in PC software. The commission has also taken a long, hard look at the DoubleClick acquisition, and many experts expect it to follow the FTC’s example.

So, as Microsoft will undoubtedly argue, if a merger between the world’s biggest pay-per-click internet advertiser and the one of the world’s leading online display advertising firms is acceptable, why would there be a problem with the number two and three search engines getting together?

All Microsoft’s official communications about the Yahoo proposal refer to a “dominant” online search advertising firm. Redmond will argue that combining with its rival will increase competition in the market by offering customers an alternative to Google that can match it more closely in user base and market share.

Google, however, is probably already telling regulators that in a market dominated by three companies, taking one of those out is to the detriment of competition. Remember that opposition to the DoubleClick deal in Europe was led by a Microsoft complaint to the EU. Google will seriously consider returning the compliment.

Microsoft will have a battle on its hands to see the acquisition through, but the deal makes sense all round.

So the fight for the online advertising dollar is well and truly underway. Internet ad spend last year was estimated at $40bn – forecasts suggest it will double to $80bn in 2010. Microsoft wants a bigger share of the pie, and the combination with Yahoo is the obvious way to achieve it.

The question marks that remain will be about how well two companies with very different development cultures can integrate. Yahoo and Microsoft have both been left in the lurch at times by the speed of new web trends and technologies – the success of Google Maps, for example. Will more programmers and more research and development cash be enough to close that innovation gap? It’s a hard task, but don’t bet against it.

But the acid test will be what you do – you, the internet user.

If you use Yahoo because you hate Microsoft, will you be driven into the arms of Google? Yahoo has a huge and loyal user base, every single one of whom is just a click away from becoming a Google customer instead.

When Ford bought Volvo, for example, Volvo drivers were unlikely to sell their cars in protest. But loyalty on the internet is a far more ephemeral thing.

We can expect to see Microsoft vs Google as the head-to-head for the internet era. But the winner will not be decided by advertisers, regulators or developers. It will be decided by you.