Skip to main content

Rupert Murdoch May Ban Google from Indexing News Corp Stories

news-corp-logo

Rupert Murdoch’s move to online users to pay for content they read is infamous at this point. The publishing impresario has some of the most popular newspapers in the world under his News Corp umbrella.

Murdoch is also running one of the few successful publications online that charges for access — The Wall Street Journal. The catch for Murdoch is that there is a well known workaround for accessing WSJ content online without having to pay or register with the publication — Google. You can search the title of most any WSJ story that requires a paid account with Google and find the complete article for free.

Related Videos

Murdoch is now saying that he will remove stories all together from Google’s search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content. Encourage here is a synonym for force. Murdoch told Sky News Australia that the papers in his empire including the Sun, Times, and WSJ would consider blocking Google entirely once that fully enacted plans for charging people to read stories.

Murdoch said, “I think we will (block Google), but that’s when we start charging. 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.”

Murdoch continued saying, “There’s a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether… but we’ll take that slowly.”

Murdoch had previously promised that starting in 2010 charging for the use of his websites would be enacted. He is backtracking on that a bit and now says that he won’t promise that date will be met.

Murdoch said, “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. 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.”

The ill will between Murdoch and Google is building on the back of significantly reduced traffic to MySpace. MySpace has a lucrative search deal in place with Google that may be one of the reasons the paid content work around has not been addressed before. With significantly increased competition from Facebook pushing MySpace into a second place spot in the social networking scene, MySpace has missed traffic goals set by Google. The shortfall in traffic equates to the potential for the loss of more than $100 million in income from the Google search deal.

As Murdoch ramps up his schemes to make money off the internet, Google CEO Eric Schmidt continues to scoff at Murdoch’s plans. Schmidt has said in the past, “In general these models (paid online content) have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity. So my guess is for niche and specialist markets … it will be possible to do it but I think it is unlikely that you will be able to do it for all news.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
The FTC may once again go after Google for abusing search dominance
google

Google is constantly going through antitrust lawsuits in Europe, but it seems like the company may once again have to deal with them stateside. The FTC is reportedly asking questions about whether or not Google is abusing its dominance in the search market, suggesting that the agency may be looking to reopen an investigation that was closed three years ago.

According to a report from Politico, which cites "sources close to the matter," antitrust officials at the FTC have been in talks with executives at "a major U.S. company that objects to Google's practices." Despite the fact that talks seem to be in their early stages, the reports do show that perhaps Google isn't done with antitrust lawsuits just yet.

Read more
New Google News feature aims to ensure that you never miss a local story
google now launcher discontinued nexus 6

Hyperlocal publications may not have the geographic reach of behemoths like The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but that doesn't lessen their importance to the people within their readership. That's for good reason -- chances are you won't see the same perspective on a land fracking rights story or a lead-tainted water supply scandal as you might from a national paper. That's in part why Google is making it easier to distinguish local sources in Google News starting today.

Google, specifically, is adding an inconspicuous tag to articles from smaller publications which show up in search. Browse a national story on the iOS and Android Google News & Weather app, or Google News on the web, and you'll see "Local Source" designation next to regional publications (tag targets are identified "automatically," Google says, based on the publisher's past and present story locations).

Read more
News Corp wants Google to take stronger action against piracy
rupert murdoch step down ceo 21st century fox shutterstock

News Corporation executive Robert Thomson is the latest big cheese to take Google to task over its approach to combating Internet piracy, TorrentFreak reports. Thomson cited instances of widespread piracy in Australia, where many allegedly swipe episodes of Game of Thrones, instead of paying for subscriptions to Foxtel, a cable and TV service provider based in that country.
"For a company to have a sophisticated algorithm that knows ­exactly where you are and what you’re doing and maintains ignorance on piracy is an untenable contradiction," Thomson said. "There’s no doubt that search giants need to be held to account. It’s obvious that it is illegal content or content accessed illegally."
Back in March, Google made a recommendation to the Australian government, arguing that online piracy is an issue that stems from problems relating to the availability and price of content.
"We would be disappointed if the Government decided to go down the route of overly harsh regulation to combat piracy without considering the evidence from around the world that this would likely be costly for businesses to implement and with little effect," Google reportedly said.
Despite Google's statements on the matter, Foxtel CEO Richard Freudenstein says that current piracy levels are simply unacceptable.
“We made Game of Thrones available at a good price on Foxtel Play and yet it was still heavily illegally downloaded," Freudenstein says. "The longer this goes on, the more people don’t seem to think of it as theft, which is what it is."
However, according to TorrentFreak, it costs $500 USD to get access to season 4 of Game of Thrones via Foxtel Play, with a per-episode rate of $50.
If those prices are accurate, it's no wonder that high levels of piracy are occurring in Australia, and around the world as well.

Read more