Google-Yahoo to Washington: We're moving forward.

I've been watching this battle for a couple of years now - this arm-wrestling match between the Washington suits and the Silicon Valley geeks to see which has more power. Tally one up for the geeks this week, who basically told Washington, "Yeah, you really don't matter."

Maybe that's an extreme way of looking at it but how else do you explain the "We are going to move forward" comment to by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, talking to Bloomberg about the non-exclusive ad deal that Google and Yahoo reached back in June. At the time, the companies said they would give Washington three months to scrutinize it, a way of being proactive and addressing possible antitrust concerns ahead of time. But apparently, Schmidt has little patience with bureaucratic feet-dragging. "We are in the process of talking to the government," he said. "They've not indicated one way or the other how they're dealing with us.”

Election year or not, Silicon Valley still has work to do and it won't put things on hold for something like an election - or so it seems.

Later, after Schmidt spoke to Bloomberg, a company spokesman toned down the message: "Ultimately we have confidence that they'll be able to conduct their review within that time period and allow us to move forward.''