How many of you have taken the time to look at exactly what Google has told the SEC about their deal with AOL?

I take back what I said about Google selling out. It actually looks like it could be a whole lot more interesting and totally muddy than that. In fact, if I’m reading that 8K filing correctly, Google started a subsidiary company with that $1,000,000,000 and that new company is the one that has bought the 5% of AOL. At least thats the effective result of what I can make out in the filing.

Here’s Search Engine Watch’s summary list of what they’ve seen in that 8K.

  • Some of the exact details of the agreement are still being worked out. That’s expected to complete the first quarter of next year.
  • Should some details not be agreed, a resolution will be reached through binding arbitration.
  • Google is going to hold its 5 percent share of AOL through a new limited liability company (either called HoldCo or that being the term used to indicate a yet to be named holding company)
  • Google can sell the HoldCo interests in a public offering as of July 1, 2008 or afterward.
  • AOL can prevent a sale by exercising its right to purchase HoldCo from Google at an appraised fair market value.
  • The deal runs for five years, substantially longer than any previous deal Google and AOL have had.
  • It covers AOL being able to sell text ads on its own site in addition to carrying the same type ads from Google.
  • It covers AOL being able to sell display ads on the Google network.
  • It covers AOL being promoted on Google “consistent with Google principles,” plus AOL receiving ad credits.
  • Google will fund marketing efforts for AOL through third party media outlines to promote agreed upon properties.
  • It covers the previously promised help for AOL and Time Warner to understand how to be indexed by Google better: “We have agreed to assist AOL and Time Warner in understanding our published and/or publicly available tools for improving the accessibility of a web site’s content to Google’s web crawlers.”
  • Google Talk users will have to register their names with AIM in order to interact with AIM clients.

SearchEngineWatch blog

Take this in line with what Google has today come out and said publicly about how this will affect the Google site itself…

I’m still not so certain I like this arrangement. Theres still a lot of grey areas that are still keeping it quite ambiguous. Until the final details are ironed out between the two companies and the SEC is finally informed of the whole lot, this is really going to be causing lots of speculation for a while yet.

The only thing I see about this that is any different from the original dotCom days is that this is real cash. Not a stock swap. Otherwise, it is very much a dotCom-like transaction.