Google needs to make an example out of Murdoch
A new profile of septuagenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch says that the News Corp. chief is ready to press legal action against Google if talks fail with the search giant over indexing content.
In a lengthy article in New York magazine that hit the Web late on Sunday, writer Gabriel Sherman quotes a source high up in the media industry echelon who says Murdoch is "pretty tightly wound up over Google and has been ready to sue them...He doesn't trust them at all." The lawsuit, presumably, would come if Google refused to stop indexing News Corp. search results without paying a fee for them.
Google representatives were not immediately available to provide a reaction.
It's been said countless times before that Google goes out of its way to make sure that it is not profiting directly or even indirectly off of the services it provides for searching news articles. Consider this site-level search of FoxNews.com for "Obama" and this one which is a plain search for "Obama." The only extent to which Google was "profiting off of other's work" in the second search was by pointing users to some of the top news about Barack Obama while having advertising on a page that was otherwise extremely diverse with most of the content coming from government sites, wikipedia or small sites that aren't for-profit media outlets. Likewise, this search for Bill O'Reilly is at least a mixed blessing for Fox News (if not particularly good for O'Reilly himself) since the ads on that page are for sites that sell O'Reilly's books.
This is pathological hatred of Google and other search engines is no different from the greed which compels music labels and movie studios to sometimes claim that they have a God-given right to a chunk of Apple's iPod and iPhone sales because their content "adds value" and that there is some implicit profiting from piracy which morally obligates Apple to spread around the wealth. So Google's response should be to simply ask News Corp: "do you really want to be delisted?" If the answer is yes, then Google should simply delist every site owned by News Corp, including MySpace, and if News Corp changes its mind, Google should tell them that it won't reindex them for at least 90 days.
We're reaching a point where content creators need to be forced to live within the same economy as the rest of us. Their failure to find a business model that successfully monetizes their content is their fault, not Google's fault.
