The acquisition talks between Google and Groupon have ended.

“It’s as over as these things get,” said one person close to the situation.

The reasons for the collapse of the discussions are not clear at this moment, but it seems to center on the decision by the social buying site to remain independent and perhaps go for an IPO.

There are sure to be conflicting stories over the next few days. Did Google get cold feet first? Was there a tussle over a breakup fee, in case of too much regulatory scrutiny? Were the cultural differences too much?

As BoomTown reported earlier today, the annual revenue run rate for Groupon is $2 billion.

Groupon gets to keep about half of that and the rest goes to the myriad merchants it strikes deals with worldwide.

That’s still tremendous growth since its founding in 2008.

And that’s why Silicon Valley search giant Google and Chicago-based start-up Groupon have been in talks in recent weeks about a mammoth acquisition at a $6 billion price tag.

Groupon had turned down a bid of $3 billion from Yahoo earlier this year.

Now, it’s likely that the company will begin a new funding process.

Its closest competitor–LivingSocial–just got $175 million in a strategic investment from Amazon.

Chicago Breaking Business first posted a report of the talks ending, also citing a desire to be independent on the part of Groupon.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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Helpful, right? Check out this MediaPost piece if you want more on the survey, conducted by media-buying shop Round2 Communications.

The bigger picture: This week, as you’ll hear over and over again, is the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse. The BBC has both a radio drama and a made-for-TV movie commemorating/dramatizing the event.

Which means it’s the one-year anniversary of the economy’s collapse from recession to (short-lived) catastrophe. Which means this is the one-year anniversary of the collapse of the advertising business. Which means that any year-over-year results you see now had best show an increase because they’re going up against positively brutal comparisons from 12 months ago.

Remember: This ad drop was so bad that even Google (GOOG) flatlined for a bit.

So if and when you do see signs of a rebound, make sure you’re looking at them with some perspective: There’s just about nowhere to go but up. Right?

The buzzy microblogging service has just grabbed its highest-profile Google (GOOG) exec to date: Alexander Macgillivray, a deputy general counsel at the search firm, is coming aboard as Twitter’s top lawyer.

Macgillivray is best known as the lead Google attorney on high-profile intellectual property cases like its fights with book publishers, the Associated Press and Viacom (VIA). Twitter has yet to find itself mired in that sort of thing, but give it time.

Macgillivray is just the latest Googler to land at Twitter. Earlier this year, the start-up nabbed Doug Bowman, the search giant’s lead designer, to join the ranks of several other Googleplex veterans, including, of course, co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone.

There are lots of reasons to leave a big company for a scrappy start-up, but just to spell out one obvious one: If you’re into risk, there is a whole lot more upside at Twitter these days.

The company’s last funding round pegged its value at $240 million, and if it ends up being acquired in the next few years, that number could be much higher. But Google shares stalled long before last fall’s stock market collapse (click chart to enlarge):

[Image credit: Doc Searls]

And it will hurt some Internet companies more than others.

“Should the economy run into a recession, this would be only the second downward economic cycle for the Internet. Each Internet company is at a different phase of its evolution,” Aggarwal added. “We believe that a possible recession will be felt harder by those companies that have been delivering extremely high organic growth rates, have high operating leverage, or are approaching minimum operating scale levels in 2008-2009.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Wall Street: Give Me Something to Stop the Bleeding
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Apparently, it isn’t. Ellis writes that contract pricing in the current quarter looks on track to fall 22 percent, “worse than our SanDisk royalty model [of] down 10 percent.” As a result, Ellis says product gross margin for the fourth quarter of this year and for all of next year could be 1 to 3 percentage points lower than the Street’s modeling.

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