What does GooTube mean?

The GooTube deal has been pored over more than sufficiently elsewhere (Techmeme), so I'll skip the details. Nonetheless, to my mind the deal leaves several questions unanswered.

(1) Despite the justification (SeekingAlpha) for the all-share deal (tax advantages, yadda yadda), Google's largest ever acquisition leaves completely untouched its $10 billion cash pile. Google has so much of the green stuff that a while ago it risked being regulated as a mutual fund (Answers.com). If Google's $10 billion isn't for funding this sort of acquisition...what's it holding that cash for? (Clue: "because it can" is not a satisfactory discharge of its duty to maximise shareholder value.)

(2) Why does Mark Cuban et al continue to protest that YouTube is going to be the focus of Hollywood's rearguard action against copyright violation? YouTube is a hopelessly inefficient way for consumers to steal copyrighted video content off the web. It's well suited to the negligible-attention-span clips that its users post up there, to music videos and to teasers and excerpts from longer (copyrighted) works. But as a way of watching films or TV it's a poor second to downloading the whole thing using BitTorrent, and the studios will be much better served getting to grips with how they can serve the needs of their customers than suing the new YouTube owner over trivial violations.

(They could start by working out how much piracy their DRM policies actually prevents - at guess, none - and how many ex-customers would go back to paying for their content rather than BitTorrenting if they offered it DRM-free and transferable across multiple devices - another guess, more than none.)

And the most thoughtful analysis I've seen of the GooTube deal so far is Andy Kessler's, who comments,

"Who are the next media moguls and to whom do they have to sell their souls for the priveledge? The $165 billion question left unanswered by this deal is: What is media anymore? Can you just slap videos up on the Web and become a younger and more vibrant Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone?"