Twitter has allegedly held initial talks with Google and Facebook

“Mine….all mine…”

Yesterday (Wednesday) the Wall Street Journal – a Murdoch-owned paper – finally ackowledged the rumours swirling around medialand by reporting that Twitter had been in talks with both Facebook and Google about a possible equity exchange or even merger.

At the start of the week, of course, AOL shocked most observers by paying out a whopping sum for the Huffington Post. What I suspect a lot of people don’t know is that Google owns 5% of AOL. Were Google to bag Twitter (and personally I can’t see the strategic sense in it, but that has rarely got in the way of such deals before) the company would be added to a long list of acquisitions and diversifications that include Blogger, YouTube, Doubleclick and Feedburner.

Facebook itself is in bed with Goldman Sachs – not as an equity partner, but as an introducer of investors. It’s rather typical of Goldman’s double standards that it passed on becoming a stakeholder in Facebook itself, but now enthusiastically recommends the investment to its clients; but be that as it may, we could wind up with an ownership connection very soon that goes like this:

Google-Twitter-Blogger-YouTube-AOL-Huffington Post

For many readers that won’t mean much, so suppose I express it another way? Imagine if, in 1979 the same group connection had run:

BT-ITV-Royal Mail-The Daily Mirror

Mrs Thatcher wouldn’t have stood a snowball in Hell’s chance of being elected. Which is ironic, because I find it tends to be those of a Right Wing bent who, when it comes to Net neutrality in 2011, tend to ask what all the fuss is about. Perhaps this merely reflects the Right Wing nature of people like Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Mark Zuckerberg, and almost all ISP CEOs I could name. Perhaps the illiberal Right would be very happy to see that collection of Toby Jug seconds win.

Let’s just take one organisation. Oh alright then, Newscorp. Owned by one family but growing on the back of gullible investors and illegal privacy invasion. It owns almost the entire media set of Australia, the key Establishment paper in Britain, the two biggest tabloids in Britain, Sky television, Fox television, the NY Daily Post, and the biggest financial/business paper in the US. It has just tied up an apps alliance with Apple, and launched The Daily, a mid-market online tabloid.

Lined up against all the monopolists mentioned in the two preceding paragraphs are organisations like WordPress (which hosts this site – and yes, that’s why I’m here, and why I left Blogger) and, um, not many others really. A good reason for this is that very few people cleave to those on the Web’s Left Wing because, like ‘Progressive’ stand-ups and politicians, they’re about as engaging as a female praying mantis with a headache.

For the nth time, this is what internet news needs, and very badly: an objective, professional and acutely analytical news organisation that will stand up for small versus big, open versus secret, and individual versus State. One that’s fed up of Republican v Democrat and Labour v Conservative Right-fights-Left tedium, when none of it is relevant any more.

Might is wrong. Money distracts. Power corrupts. And if such is allowed, the culture degrades, and civilisation ends. It is no more complex an equation than that.