Google Acquires Internet

MAY
12, 2017 - BUSINESSWIRE. Mountain View-based search giant Google Inc
today announced they’ve acquired the internet for the astounding sum of
$2,455.5 billion in cash. The deal had been rumored in various search
blogs since the beginning of the year and was now confirmed by the
company’s CEO. “This is in line with our vision to make information
more accessible to end users,” says Eric Schmidt. “With the
acquisition, we can increase the speed of indexing as everything will
already be on our servers by the time it’s published.”

In a conference call earlier today, Larry Page explained the
strategy behind the acquisition. “We realized it’s not very
cost-effective to buy the internet in smaller portions.” During the
past two decades, Google had acquired YouTube for $1.65, DoubleClick
for $3.1 billion, AOL for $12.5 billion, and last year, Microsoft for
the record sum of $120 billion.

Questioned on the first steps the company would take integrating the
internet onto their servers, Eric Schmidt announced immediate plans to
redirect Yahoo.com to Google’s own search engine. “From an end user
perspective, having two search engines is just bad usability, and
[causes confusion]. While we appreciate Yahoo’s recent advances in
search technology, we felt this move is best aligned with the interests
of our advertisers, users and shareholders.” Eric added, “By leveraging
third-generation mobile platforms in sustainable verticals, new
monetization opportunities can manifest into an improved web
experience, greatly benefiting investors and digerati alike – a true
paradigm change synergizing the Web 6.0 framework on the enterprise
level.”

Accompanying Google’s acquisition revelation, privacy groups today
released a paper criticizing the move. However, Larry Page argues that
privacy is improved by Google’s acquisition, explaining that “[the]
main privacy issues for users today are data leaks to third parties. By
eliminating all third parties, we closed this hole.” Eric Schmidt adds
that Google intends to replace their current privacy policy with a
“privacy scale” which better balances necessary compromises. “When you
can improve the privacy of a large group of people by violating the
privacy rights of a small number of people, in the end this improves
overall privacy.”

The Chinese government in the meantime congratulated Google Inc on
their move. Regarding the potentials of expanded censorship, Sergey
Brin told members of the press that Google would now drop all search
results filtering and instead “address the root problem from a
publisher perspective” by directly blocking certain keywords the time
they are entered in Google-owned tools such as Blogger, Gmail, Page
Creator, Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces. Amnesty International and Reporters
Without Borders were not available for comment at this time due to
temporary technical problems with their web-based email clients.

Google Acquires Internet by Philipp Lenssen