An Interesting Note in Google’s 10K: No Favored Nation Status for AOL

Thanks to Bear Stearn’s Robert Peck, for doing the work, in the summary of the 10K he finds:

Google also stated that they have substantially completed negotiations with Time Warner and AOL and expect the investment to close in 2Q06. One of the prior elements in the agreement, “making AOL content more accessible to Google web crawlers”, was removed, likely due to concerns that Google would give AOL’s content preferential treatment in its search results. AOL represented 9% of revenues in 05, down from 12% of revenues in 04.



So, it seems, Google and AOL have quietly dropped one of the most controversial elements of the deal. Remember the hubbub (I made a shark jumping comment, you may recall)?