The great new American parlor game involves lining up on one side or the other of the Google IPO.

Normally I would ignore the hype. But this IPO offers important issues, chief among them the power of Wall Street to control the financial markets.

While the markets are located around Wall Street, brokers should not be controlling them. Yet they have controlled them, for over a century, manipulating prices through "analyst reports" with clear conflicts of interest.

And in this case, the conflict is manifest, because it's in the analysts' interest that this IPO fail.

This may be the first big IPO ever where analysts had that interest, but you need to understand the fact of it if you're to read between the lines here.

Google has unilaterally cut the commission Wall Street is taking on this deal, from the normal 7% of proceeds to 3%. It has also forbade its investment bankers from playing other reindeer games -- using IPO stock to reward big customers, setting a price that will discourage quick "flipping" (and quick profits).

If other companies follow Google's lead, if they wait until they don't need the money to sell stock, if they insist on low costs, if they discourage flipping, thousands of investment bankers will lose their jobs. No wonder Wall Street is dumping on this deal.

One of their chief points is that the founders are keeping control of the company after the deal. They have split the shares into "A" and "B" stock. They're keeping the B, which has 10 times the voting power of the A. The public can't buy out the founders. Wall Street calls this scandalous.

But if it is scandalous, it's not unusual, either. John Malone has played this game for years, but you don't see Wall Street complaining about it. The Coors brewery has super-voting B shares held by the family. It may be wrong (as the Business Week link from Coors notes) but 11.3% of the nearly 2,000 companies tracked by Investor Responsibility Research Center have multiple classes of common -- it's not unusual.

This is not to say Google is trouble-free. Google's Blogger has major problems -- I found I was unable to reach any Blogspot blog for much of yesterday evening, and the company is rapidly losing share to Movable Type. Google News is having trouble keeping up with the industry's registration firewalls, and has yet to deal effectively with "commentary" sites, essentially blogs masquerading as news sources. Google also faces growing competition, and the company's documents are far from transparent as to how many servers they actually have.

All that said, there is an easy way to play this. If you want some Google IPO stock, here's how to set a bid: