one BILLION dollars...

Good lord -- advertising, instant messaging and video, oh, my. Am I the only one who did not know that AOL is not a publicly held company?

The advertising to be made available to AOL includes even Google's AdSense program! What has the Internet (with a capital "I") come to? Google is the antithesis of AOL -- minimal ads (check their respective homepages, AOL.com and google.com) -- good lord, it takes AOL at least 7 - 10 seconds to load all of that flash!

AOL will also apparently have access "that will enable AOL to directly sell search ads on AOL-owned properties," according to ZDNet (yes, I monitor via RSS).

And what about this quote:

Also under the deal, Google will "make sure AOL Webmasters architect their content" so it gets maximum exposure to Google's Web crawlers, but will not exchange any proprietary information to do that.

WTF, mate? Will AOL content have priority over real web content? Yes, I said "real web," as hopefully Internet (with a capital "I") users know that AOL is not the real Internet.

The only positive I can see coming out of this is that AOL users will have a taste of what the actual Internet, or Intertron as I've become accustomed to calling it, can provide to them as opposed to AOL's sanitized and isolated proprietary content.

god save us all. The masses are upon us.

UPDATE, 12/21: Well of course Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) is publicly traded. AOL is a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner, according to the company's recent press release about this new strategic alliance. So while AOL used to be traded on the NYSE under the AOL ticker symbol it has since been acquired by Time Warner, so AOL as an entity is no longer traded as a separate individual company. I just thought it was weird that one company would be able to just invest $1 billion dollars in a publicly traded company (if that's what it is) without any securities or regulatory oversight.