

In what has to be one of the weirdest Q&As we've read in a long time, Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells Portfolio's Russ Mitchell that a Microsoft-Yahoo deal could "break the internet."

Was he kidding? Apparently not. When Mitchell asked Schmidt to elaborate, he said, "All internet-based systems today are highly interoperable, open systems. The whole antitrust trial that Microsoft went through was really about it breaking that."

Of course, Google isn't a position to talk about openness – the company has earned the reputation as one of the most secretive, uncooperative research communities on the planet, leading critics to call for increased transparency.