Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

it's official. after all the speculation, google has finally formally announced the purchase of youtube. i always thought they'd make a good pairing....actually, i thought they'd make a scary pairing. scary not for the users but for major media companies. what this situation now implies is that youtube will have the infrastructure and capital to defend themselves. along with that google had done some preemptive strikes against major media by signing deals with various music labels to promote music videos. before only one company i believe made such a deal with youtube. google, on the other hand, went for quite a few. right now, google said in their acquisition report the reasoning behind this, which was to search video. this isn't the reason. the reason is that google's mission is to "do no evil." youtube, which is significantly larger, imo than google video in terms of content and quality, is constantly threatened by the presence of copyright infringement lawsuits. having google own them works in two fold in this model: 1) google can sustain them via money in case of copyright infringement lawsuits; 2) big media companies won't dare go against google. the thing with google is that they're not just a business, but a core infrastructure piece that threatens every aspect of business out there. if big media goes after google, they'd end up shooting themselves in the foot because google controls so much advertisement these days. unlike a lot of big media, google has true global presence. that's what makes them a threat to traditional media companies. so why not just go with an ask.com or msn or yahoo? you gotta be joking. taking away google for companies is like taking away your calculator for calculating Pi. msn is clueless. ask.com is too small and their search results are inaccurate. yahoo hooks into everything and they're completely unfocused. google has been doing things right because they understand some abstract aspect that these other companies don't. again where does this leave youtube? very well protected. it's almost like an asylum. google just fucked all those media companies because people were putting copyrighted material on youtube. with youtube having so much viewership, yet with so much copyrighted material, they risked another fatality much like napster. but as history has taught with napster, once you change something into pure corporate, you run the risk of losing your core audience. google is giving a huge middle finger to large companies by attempting to make content free. this has nothing to do with search anymore. media had previously given them the finger by preventing them from searching into books. this time google is saying a big "fuck you!" to traditional media by staying one step ahead of the game. the main thing here is that if you can prevent people from having to pay for content, then these major media companies lose to your model. the MPAA and RIAA present prime examples of hinders to the next levels of progress in terms of technology and allowing the average person to freely access what ought to be public domain content. i see google's move one step in taking out them as the middle man....of course, google would become the next middle man but it's yet to be seen how that role plays out.