Raw Story:
In an interview with Australian television, the cantankerous chairman of News Corporation -- which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post -- said that he was considering blocking Google searches of his content.
Asked why the company hadn't chosen to remove its news stories from Google's index after creating a pay-for-content operation (the Journal charges for some articles), Murdoch explained, "I think we will, but that's when we start charging," he said. "We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it's not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story - but if you're not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form."
"There's a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," he added. "But we'll take that slowly."
So that little snippet of text that put your search query in context? That's stealing. So maybe it's better that a Murdoch web page not show up in search results at all. Traffic will drop through the floor. And, while I kind of understand charging for the newspapers, what's it cost to watch FOX News on TV? A couple of cents on your cable bill? Most cable subscribers would see FOX -- which isn't a pay channel -- as free. Who's going to pay to go to their website?
The biggest problem with the whole paywall experiment is that the companies doing it are removing themselves from competition with the ones who aren't; it's disarming unilaterally. And dropping your pages from search engine results? That's just stupid beyond words.
Can't say I'd be extremely disappointed to see Murdoch publications all but disappear from the web, though. There's signal and there's noise. Murdoch is mostly noise.
1 comments:
Good. Let him block his propaganda garbage from Google. Who cares about Murd(er)och. He's just another greedy money monster.
As the old saying goes, a fool and his money soon part.
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