The Future of Google and YouTube. Yougle? Goobe?

Commentary: The speculation is over. So billionaire Mark Cuban commented that only a moron would buy YouTube. But the industry giant Google thought otherwise. It officially announced last week that they were buying YouTube for a hefty sum of US$1.6 billion. (Yahoo may have their own electronic anthropology project with their Time Capsule, but YouTube is also a sort of video book of humankind, a document of culture and humanity.)

I am sure Google will have one hell of a time in the future. I mean, with all the copyrighted content in YouTube, the media companies will probably be getting their lawyers ready for the lawsuit.

How is Google going to manage these copyright issues? We all know that Google has deep pockets and they can afford to stand up to the lawsuit. But its really bad that Google sets a precedent on this issue. Several media companies have filed lawsuits against smaller companies in the past, but fighting Google is going to be a tough challenge for them.

Google is definitely up to interesting pursuits. They are expanding in so many different directions that it looks really scary to some, especially status quo businesses.. Are they another IBM or Microsoft in the making, with all their acquisitions? We talked about Google Docs & Spreadsheets integration yesterday (once known as Writely). Then there’s the Google Library project that stirred up a lot of resentment by those who felt their intellectual property was being appropriated… and who knows what’s on the pipeline in the future.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders, stated not long ago that their plan was to index all of the Earth’s information, no matter how long it took. Or something to that effect. A noble goal, but not necessarily welcomed by everyone. It will be an interesting few hundred years ahead of us.