This isn’t the first time Kohl has raised concerns about the long-term implications of Yahoo’s (YHOO) proposed deal with Google (GOOG). And it almost certainly won’t be the last. Back in September, he worried aloud that the partnership might reduce Yahoo to “nothing more than the newest satellite in the Google orbit.” And nothing much has changed since that time, except for Google’s increased advocacy of the deal on the new “Yahoo-Google Facts” site.

When Google and Yahoo announced their advertising partnership back in June, the companies said they would give the Justice Department three and one half months to review it. Which is more than enough time for such a review according to Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, who said the companies will proceed with the deal in October, regardless of what federal regulators think of it. “Time is money in our business,” Schmidt told reporters Wednesday.”… While we have been talking to regulators, we don’t know what their position is. We don’t know if they think it’s a good deal or poor deal.”

Not that it particularly matters what they think, because Google has no intention of delaying the partnership anyway.

And for those like Sen. Herb Kohl who worry if the deal might reduce Yahoo (YHOO) to “nothing more than the newest satellite in the Google orbit”? Well, c’mon. Yahoo is already a satellite in the Google orbit, isn’t it? Google accounted for 77.4 percent of all search engine spending in the second quarter of 2008, according to Efficient Frontier. For crying out loud, the company claims $1.10 of every new search dollar.

And time is money in Google’s business. …

A reassuring profession of altruism, but one that the Justice Department isn’t buying. The agency has opened a formal antitrust investigation into the deal and will soon begin issuing civil investigative demands to the companies’ competitors, customers and potential partners in the hopes of determining whether it will further tighten Google’s near-monopoly grip on the search advertising market. “This is a complicated situation, but one of the key questions is very simple,” said David Balto, an antitrust lawyer who was competition policy director at the Federal Trade Commission during the Clinton administration. “What is Yahoo’s incentive to continue to compete?”

Good question.

Helpfully, Google and Yahoo have already agreed to delay implementing their new alliance for three and a half months so the DOJ can answer it.

Yet that’s exactly how Jerry Yang marked his one-year anniversary as CEO of Yahoo (YHOO). Yesterday Yang paid a visit to Capitol Hill in the hopes of tempering antitrust concerns over the Internet company’s proposed search-advertising pact with rival Google (GOOG).

During his one-day visit, Yang met with Sen. Herb Kohl (D., Wisc.), who chairs the antitrust subcommittee and has raised concerns about the long-term implications of Yahoo’s proposed deal with Google. Yahoo maintains its venture with Google won’t have an anticompetitive impact on the online-search market because it involves only a portion of Yahoo’s search business. But others (read: Microsoft [MSFT]) disagree and argue it’s the beginning of a process that will end with Yahoo outsourcing all of that business to Google and consolidating, oh say … 90% of the search-advertising market in the search sovereign’s hands.

“On the surface, it may be a compelling argument,” Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, said of Yahoo’s claim that the deal is benign. But she added: “Over time, what this is doing is setting up a trajectory where [advertisers] move over to Google and they become the only game in town.”

“The implications of this [deal] for the Internet advertising market–and for the Internet as a whole–are profound and potentially far reaching,” the Senators wrote. “A core part of Google’s business is placing contextual advertising–that is, text-based ads placed on third-party Web sites which are relevant to the content or to the likely reader of the Web site. Google has a dominant market position with respect to the placing of these contextual ads. DoubleClick has a leading market position in placing another form of Internet advertising–display advertising which also resides on third-party Web sites. Industry experts that we spoke to in the course of our inquiry raised serious concerns that combining these two companies’ leading positions in these two forms of Internet advertising could cause significant harm to competition in the Internet advertising marketplace.”

The acquisition is potentially problematic for reasons of privacy as well. “DoubleClick collects an enormous quantity of information on individual Web users’ preferences, and privacy advocates have expressed very serious concerns regarding the consequences of this data coming under the control of Google due to the fact that Google is the dominant Internet search engine and can also track individuals’ search requests,” the senators note. “Therefore, we believe that this deal raises fundamental consumer privacy concerns worthy of serious scrutiny.”

The senators’ arguments echo ones we’ve heard before–from the European Union and Microsoft, and from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Though, as Danny Sullivan notes over at Search Engine Land, they’re a tad bit more hysterical. Certainly, Microsoft’s $6 billion purchase of digital-ad firm aQuantive suggests the barriers to entry in the Internet advertising marketplace aren’t more than knee high. And as for privacy, well, Sun chairman Scott McNealy once said: “You have no privacy, get over it.”