If talks break down, Google may face yet another lawsuit fueled from the deep pockets of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Google’s woes never end. After a month of criticism from the European Union, guilty convictions for top executives in Italy, and even a class-action lawsuit on the botched launch of Buzz, it now appears that media mogul Rupert Murdoch may be aiming his legal guns in Google’s direction, too.
According to a new report from New York Magazine, Murdoch’s spat with Google over indexing News Corp. content still simmers in talks, but Murdoch is prepared to sue if things boil over.
“He is pretty tightly wound up over Google and has been ready to sue them,” a News Corp. executive is quoted as saying in the article. “He doesn’t trust them at all.”
The bad blood with Google stems from the search engine’s indexing of News Corp content. Google believes it does news outlets a favor by indexing stories in tools like Google News and driving traffic to the sites. Murdoch believes his company should be paid for the privilege of using News Corp excerpts in search results. Currently, Murdoch runs one of the few online sources that manages to demand payment for content: The Wall Street Journal.
“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,” Murdoch originally stated when he first butted heads with Google. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”
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RSSFrom what I understand, the Google Business Model, is that they make money from selling ads in the ledger of their own page, where only the headline, link, source and the first 2 sentences are on display. If I (the end user) want to read the full article, I click on the link and it takes me to the source's web page, perhaps the Fox News website. The Fox News Website has a bunch of ads, which Fox News makes money off of each time someone visits their website. Of course, more people look at Google and link through there to the various news websites, so without Google, yahoo, and other news indexing services, less people would view the actual pages of various news outlets.
SOLUTION: If Rupert believes that indexing and linking to other companies web pages ought to be illegal, then perhaps he should have to encrypt his pages so it can't be accessed so easily. That is the other option, right.....if you don't want possible consumers to look at your data, then close your curtains.
CONSPIRACY THEORY ALERT: I think Rupert is worried about other media outlets getting viewers from Google, and wants to shut it down. People for some reason, trust NewsCorp, and will seek them out. They blast all other media as liberal mainstream media, despite the fact that a lot of these places that appear in Google's indexing service are a mix of regional, national and international news sources from both liberal and conservative parts of the country. When your smaller competitors have the same possible viewership as you do, it's hard to control what everyone sees. And when a smaller competitor from a conservative area spews different political opinions, it's difficult to label them as liberal mainstream media (which makes it harder to control the politics of fear).