Cryptic note today at Federal Computer Week:

General Services Administration officials are negotiating with Google’s YouTube about the rules governing posting government videos on YouTube, a GSA official said today.

The negotiations focus on YouTube’s terms of service, said Tobi Edler, a GSA spokeswoman.

A coalition of federal agencies led by GSA’s Office of Citizen Services has been negotiating with YouTube for six months, Edler said.

When an agreement is reached, it will be offered to all federal agencies, Edler said.

“The discussions have been fruitful but are still continuing, and the final agreement has not yet been reached,” Edler said.

I don’t quite know what this means. But if it means what I think it means, that YouTube will become a preferred outlet for government publication of video, I don’t like it.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it would be great to have government video on YouTube. But wouldn’t it be better to support something like archive.org, or better yet to build a government infrastructure, available to all levels of government for publication of government produced video? And then let a Creative Commons license do the rest?

Ok, ***Deep Breath***. It’s really impossible to tell what the story is here. Let’s wait till it comes out — but this is definitely something to watch. Be prepared to fight the Googlization of government in the very near future.