Rupert Murdoch is Mr. Burns. It’s pretty obvious isn’t it. He’s fiendishly smart, old as dirt, out of touch and could buy Haiti if he had a mind to. If you’re not familiar with him I recommend you look at this list, which details the many holdings of his company, News Corp. He owns the New York Post, the Dow Jones news wire and the Sun and the Times in the UK.
In an interview with Sky News Australia, Murdoch said that the company planned to remove its newspaper websites from Google indexes once it starts charging for additional publications online. In the same interview he also vented against all other search engines, aggregators and “fair use” so much so that I imagine his jowls trembled.
It’s all poppycock of course, if you really want to remove your sites from Google it takes one line of code called the robots.txt file. What some commentators are saying and something I tend to agree with, is that Murdoch is angling for one of the lower tier search engines (Bing, Ask.com) to pony up for the exclusive rights to index his newspaper content. He pulled the same trick before with Myspace in 2006 when Google paid $900 million for exclusive rights but now Google has smartened up and Myspace is in a nosedive.
Regardless I think any plan to put newspaper content behind a paywall is doomed to failure, I just wish he’d get on with it all ready.
+ Veteran press commentator Jack Shafer at Slate has an excellent peice on the subject called “Read Between the Lies.” [Slate]
+ Roy Greenslade of the Guardian in the UK talks about just how hollow Murdoch’s threats against the search engines are. [Guardian]
+ The always solid Mathew Ingram, the communities editor at the Globe and Mail, uses the commotion to make a point about how readers are really paying the websites they visit. [MathewIngram.com]
+ Fellow billionaire Mark Cuban even chimed in with his own take on how Murdoch doesn’t need Google, after all there is Twitter and Facebook now! [blogmaverick.com]
Tags: Google, Rupert Murdoch, Search Engines, Simpsons
