ChasNote

Google’s deal with Fox Interactive (MySpace and the rest), according to the Aug 10 edition of Economist, is the crowning jewel in the most dominant empire since Napoleon’s:

“PRINCE KLEMENS VON METTERNICH, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, would have no trouble recognising Google. To him, the world’s most popular web-search engine would closely resemble the Napoleonic France that in his youth humiliated Austria and Europe’s other powers. Its rivals—Yahoo!, the largest of the traditional web gateways, eBay, the biggest online auction and trading site, and Microsoft, a software empire that owns MSN, a struggling web portal—would look a lot like Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Metternich responded by forging an alliance among those three monarchies to create a ‘balance of power’ against France. Google’s enemies, he might say, ought now to do the same thing….”

“….The strongest alliance, of course, would be a merger or takeover. MSN and Yahoo! both wanted to buy some or all of AOL, a big, troubled internet-access company owned by Time Warner, a media conglomerate. But Google pre-empted its rivals last winter and bought a defensive stake in AOL. It still has its search and advertising technology stationed on AOL’s site. Google may also make its instant-messaging service interoperable with AOL’s, the most popular in the world. With AOL lost to the enemy, what of a deal between Microsoft and either Yahoo! or eBay? Justin Post, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, said recently that Microsoft’s ‘acquisition probability’ is now so high that it may soon start pushing up the share prices of eBay and Yahoo! Mr Post thinks that Microsoft is most likely to bid for Yahoo!”

Inneresting. The turf wars over content sites — the pageviews of the Internet that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL don’t already control — have officially begun.