Eric Schmidt with the axe in the Blogosphere
SearchViews says "Eric Schmidt firmly denied that money had been reserved from the Google/YouTube deal to buy off media companies." Then, the posting goes on to make a completely mistaken assertion about my posting that suggested that the deal may have involved some collusion:
His words give a firm ax to a rumor that started with an anonymous post relayed through Mark Cuban's blog. The rumors, blown out of proportion by a number of major media sources, claim that the Google/YouTube deal was collusion.
It would be nice, I suppose, if the words of a CEO could be so reliable that they put "an axe" in debate about the conduct of his business. The folks at SearchViews, which is aHey, SearchViews, you should correct and retract your posting. blog run by RepriseMedia, a company that makes a business of optimizing Google and Overture results, are not in a position to dispatch questions without revealing their own conflicts of interest.
In order for me to blow Mark Cuban's rumors "out of proportion" you'd think it would have been necessary for Cuban to publish first. Not to mention that I would have had to be writing about the same thing.
On neither count is the charge accurate. Cuban posted his assertions of collusion on October 30 where I published on October 19. Somehow, I managed to take his ideas and expand on them 11 days before he published.
Except we weren't talking about the same thing. His posting conveyed speculation about companies agreeing to refrain from prosecuting copyright infringement claims for a period of time after the transaction where my posting was about the fact that the acquisition of shares in YouTube by several media companies were negotiated after the company had agreed to sell itself to Google. Cuban's source was talking about a different kind of collusion, the organization of a cartel that would attempt to drive "legal" use of the labels' intellectual property through YouTube.
My posting focused on the lack of disclosure to other investors in a timely fashion, which is a violation of Regulation FD and, in this case, allowed NBC Universal and Sony BMG to make investments knowing they faced no risk. Very different issues than what Cuban talked about.
More to the point, the linking of my posting to Cuban's is erroneous and self-serving, not to mention just plain full of crap because it seems calculated to ingratiate RepriseMedia to Google.
Hey, SearchViews, you should correct and retract your posting. At least, you should try reading what you seek to criticize, though in this case the posting doesn't rise to the level of criticism.
UPDATE: Rafat Ali points to changes in the YouTube deal, which give the company some cash to pay upfront for rights to content. This may not be collusion, depending on whether the labels take any action against other video sites, but it certainly raises the question about whether Google's content costs aren't set to soar.