In amassing Yahoo, AOL and other online services, Verizon is preparing for the day when its most important clients are advertisers, not users.
By DAVID GELLES
Verizon Communications' $4.83 billion acquisition of Yahoo has the technology cognoscenti scratching their heads. What does Verizon, the country's biggest wireless company, see in an internet also-ran?
Fortune criticized "The Problem With Verizon-Yahoo." T-Mobile's chief executive, John Legere, derided the deal as a "slippery slope." The chief executive of Sprint, Marcelo Claure, said that when telecommunications companies try to get into the content business, "history has proven that every single one of them has failed."