dobnits Posted:

That said, its been pretty obvious right from the get-go of youtube and became PAINFULLY obvious that something like this would happen eventually back at the buyout.

This is mostly retrospect, but I do remember entertaining the possibility of Google whoring it out way back when. But with all the pro-Google propaganda floating around, especially back around the IPO it was easy to get beguiled into thinking Google was the second coming of Christ, in search engine form (the first being AskJesus.org). Particularly because Google didn’t do anything obnoxious for the first few years after the IPO, but like China with Hong Kong it’s started to go bolder.