Verizon announced that it is buying AOL today. I hope, for the good of the world economy that it works out better than when Time Warner bought AOL for $165 billion, but there is a history to that albatross.

More importantly, there’s a history to Verizon’s interactions with the media.

We who rely on tech journalism should be worried about the sale of the parent company of sites like Engadget and TechCrunch to a firm that has shown no compunction about censoring media reports in the past. These are popular and widely-read sites even by non-tech-elites and that is why this is problem. There will always be information out there to the savvy, but AOL’s sites were seen by a wide variety of people who might not have cared about some of these issues had they not appeared in a place like Engadget or even HuffingtonPost (which may actually be spun off now). As journalism gets more and more fragmented, we need places that bridge the gaps between interests groups to be as neutral, or at least as transparent, as possible. This purchase puts some of that transparency and neutrality into question.

We should also be wary of Verizon’s past with regard to media in general, and its complicity with privacy-eradicating government agencies.

Likely stories to cease appearing on AOL’s sites:

Net Neutrality
Privacy and “Perma–Cookies”
The Mobile Web (except for ads touting 4G(!))
State-Corporation collusion and invasions of privacy
The Negative side of Big Data

And potentially more as Verizon finds other things that are best kept secret for the business model to thrive.