Google's fancy new float (for US eyes only)

Features: "Google's earnest but likeable founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are asking potential Google investors to read the entire, 164-page prospectus submitted to the SEC last night. Then, based on what they have read, they must decide how many shares they want and how much they would like to pay for them.
Based on these applications, Google - in league with underwriters Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston - will fix an initial public offering price that it hopes will last and will then allocate shares to those people who either matched or exceeded (but not by too much) it. It is thus like a giant game of 'make a thoroughly well-informed guess at the number of sweeties in the sweetie jar'.
The shares on sale will be some of those of Page and Brin themselves, along with those of other existing investors that the two are hoping to persuade to get involved. Its investors include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods and Shaqille O'Neill; no wonder they'll be called Class A stocks.
But, since it is clear at this stage neither how many shares will be on sale, nor how much they will go for, there is no real guessing at the value of this first visit of the world's most eagerly awaited stock to the stock market. The only figure Google has committed to is $2.7bn, an estimate of the total offering price generated so NYSE could set a registration fee ($344,000).
However, for most of our readers there is something of a problem: no-one 'located' outside the US will be able to bid. For such a global business, this is vexing, especially given Google's reasoning: 'We have not undertaken any efforts to qualify this offering for offers to individual investors in any jurisdiction outside the US.'In other words, it was too much like hard work to do all thi"