Now rumors are circulating that Yahoo! may partner with Google to avoid the likely ignominious end of the company via a Microsoft acquisition.

Google has already started preparing for an anti-trust challenge if Microsoft is successful, so it is hard to see how Google could argue that hitching Yahoo! to behemoth Microsoft is bad but hitching Yahoo! to gargantuan Google is good.

Whatever the outcome may be, it sounds like users of free services are in for less choice and more ads. The alternative is to simply stop using "free" services and pay for things like personal email accounts, which cost a pittance these days. It is easy to find email accounts for under $100 per year, and those accounts come with a wide range of features and services that are not always available with the free services, and are ad-free--well worth the money to some.