Crazy, Or Maybe Crazy Like a Fox!

Here's Dallas Mavericks owner and YouTube basher Mark Cuban last Friday on the rumor that search giant Google intended to buy the wildly popular online video-sharing site: "They'd be crazy."

Well, get out the straightjacket because Google announced today plans to purchase YouTube in a $1.65 billion stock deal.

Like Cuban, I don't like the deal, but for different reasons. Cuban thinks YouTube is a lawsuit waiting to happen. From Roy Mark's internetnews.com article:

"Once you go commercial, once you have to monitor for copyright violations, your whole business model changes," Cuban said. "They [YouTube] are going to get crushed."

It's a legitimate concern. YouTube features an awful lot of copyrighted material, in addition to its usual mix of home-made videos.

But I don't care about any of the lawsuit stuff. My great fear is that Google somehow will ruin YouTube. These kinds of big acquisitions almost always go awry, with the notable exception of AOL Time Warner. (Yes, I am joking.)

I suppose you can't blame Google. After all, YouTube has almost half the online video audience share, with more than 100 million videos viewed daily. And I'm sure Google would hate to see that audience fall into the clutches of Yahoo or Microsoft, both of which have expressed interest in buying YouTube.

So it may have been a good pre-emptive move by Google. I just don't want them to meddle with a good thing.