There is a pattern here...
The content cartels get cold sweats at night at the thought that somewhere, someone, is doing something with their creations that has not been explicitly authorized, or that they are somehow personally profiting from them. That is why the record labels hate Apple, despite the fact that the iTunes Music Store has been a real life line thrown to them to give would-be pirates a chance to buy a high quality single, conveniently. It is also why they hate Google for hosting Google News, despite the fact that they don't even show any advertising on that service (example)!Instead of stealing, I would call this something else: a free service that drives lots of readers to news Web sites that wouldn't get nearly as much traffic, if any at all, if Google didn't link to their sites for free. That may not be as pithy as crying "thief!" But it has the advantage of being true.
Murdoch and Curley know this. How do we know they know? Because if they really thought Google was stealing from them, and if they really wanted Google to stop driving all those readers to their Web sites at no charge, they would simply stop Google from linking to their news stories.
Google doesn't force Web sites to be included in its search listings. The people who run any site can remove it from Google's results with a few keystrokes. All they have to do is go to the Web site's robot.txt file and type this:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Poof, the site becomes invisible to Google. Their stories will no longer show up in Google searches. It will be as if they don't exist.
The complaint that Google shows advertising on its search results on the main search application is a red herring. Google has to make money somehow, and it's patently moronic to suggest that ads on the search results page will turn off users from clicking on ads on the article itself. The cold hard facts are that the newspapers will ultimately have to go to a paid content model at some point if they want direct compensation; local ads are of limited value on a website that doesn't get most of its traffic (and a lot of traffic) from locals.
It's just the same old content cartel welfare baby temper tantrum.
