The news that YouTube has pocketed $1.65bn in Google gold has stirred the technology industry and pushed yet another wave of computer savvy twenty-somethings to all-night madness in the race for the next cool thing. Business aspects of this exciting match – which would itself resemble a hook-up on a social networking site, were it not for the 10-digit transaction price – will offer financial analysts plenty of grist. But the public policy elements are perhaps even more profound, as they sail beneath the radar.

Google famously engineered the world’s greatest search engine. Initially deployed on the computer networks of the Stanford University computer science department by two precocious graduate students, an exceptionally useful product was born at just the moment that the wise men of Silicon Valley determined that web search was uninteresting, simply a commodity.