One of my favourite magazine covers ever at the Industry Standard featured pictures of Jay Walker and Mark Cuban and the coverline "This Week's Billionaires." It both conveyed the news of the week – Walker had taken his company public, Cuban had sold his to Yahoo!, both were on track to earn ten-figure sums – and the spirit of the moment, 1999, when those kinds of deals were almost routine.

Google's blockbuster acquisition of YouTube last week was definitely a throwback to those dot-com bubble days. There were the young founders, suddenly wealthy, and the object of all kinds of attention and envy. There were the venture capitalists, scoring hundreds of millions of dollars barely a year into their investment. There was the feverish excitement in Silicon Valley circles and intense media speculation about what it all might mean for the future of world.

Yet it's the differences between this deal and those of seven years ago that are most illustrative.

For one thing, the big deals these days don't involve public offerings and all the strange dynamics that go with them. There are no stock analysts touting the future value of YouTube, no friends of the founders getting rich on insider shares, no grandmas getting suckered into dubious purchases of inflated stock. The public market for money-losing internet companies is pretty much non-existent – and that's a healthy corrective, in that speculation on start-up online companies is really not a game for amateurs.

Secondly, it's telling that the buyer last week was Google, a company that is far more dominant today then any firm was during the previous bubble. With a market capitalisation of more than $130 billion, Google towers over its contemporaries, an order of magnitude larger than Yahoo! or Amazon or eBay. It’s no coincidence that the acquisition to which the YouTube deal is often compared – the purchase of MySpace by News Corp., parent company of Times Online – also involved a corporate behemoth (albeit one with a market cap of a mere $21 billion). The internet business today is the land of the giants.

Thirdly, it's remarkable how much of the feeding frenzy around Web 2.0 involves the media business in particular. YouTube promises to reinvent television, Google promises to reinvent advertising, MySpace promises to reinvent teenage social lives – no need for that second phone line when your 13-year-old is busy "social networking" in front of the screen.

These are not small developments, for sure. But the core conceit of the original dot-com bubble was that the internet was going to force the reinvention of just about every industry on earth. Banking, stock trading, shopping, tourism, insurance, health care, computers, telecommunications – all those sectors were up for grabs. In Bubble 2.0, though, you don't hear much about all that, not because nothing has happened, but because change tends to happen in fits and starts. Now it's the media's turn.

It's surprising in a way that the media industry, whose basic currency is information, was not upended sooner by the information revolution. Even as conservative bankers and brokers and retailers moved to integrate all things internet into their businesses, a lot of media companies fought a rearguard action. YouTube is touted as a revolution in television, but it's worth remembering that in the deal noted on our cover back in 1999, Mark Cuban's company, Broadcast.com, was supposed to be the entity that would revolutionise television – and on paper at least, it sold for more almost four times the price of YouTube.

When big things happen in the media business they tend to get discussed and scrutinised far more than similar developments might in other industries. That, plus the endless fascination with big money and the big score, explains why there has been so much noise around Google and YouTube. When the history is written, though, this deal won't be the one that defines the era. Or rather, if it is, it will serve as a good example of how different things are this time around.

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a new type of regional news and information service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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