Google News to Rupert Murdoch: Bring It on
The jousting between media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and the world's most popular website is heating up, with Google News telling the head of the News Corp. a resounding "as you wish."
(EPA photo)
In recent days Murdoch (above), the head of the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and many others, and his top executives have complained that the use of News Corp. content by search indexes, such as Google News, Microsoft and Ask.com, is tantamount to "kleptomania" and accused them of being "parasites."
Murdoch is threatening to charge for the content of its media empire on the Internet and to remove such content from any Internet search index.
Google News countered by saying any news organization is free to have its content removed from the search index by just requesting it.
The Google News response as quoted by Agence France Press:
Murdoch is also after the fair use doctrine, which argues that the Internet would be deprived of its very reason to exists if aggregators (such as us) would be kept from linking to other pages or sites.
"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," threatened Murdoch.
All the huffing and puffing by the Murdoch empire seems to have popped up after its heavy investments into Internet social networks, such as MySpace, have failed to respond to expectations.
Also, building firewalls to keep the Internet's traffic controllers from driving users to your content sounds like a lose-lose proposition, no matter how powerful News Corp. may be.
The New York Times, and many copycats after it, tried this approach once before and after a resounding failure, it went back to open access again.
We believe the Internet is not the newspaper slayer it has been portrayed to be, especially in the US, whose newspaper industry is undergoing the worst crisis in its history.
In fact, we believe the Internet is a transformational force of unprecedented proportions. The challenge is to learn how live and prosper with it.
In other words, war is not the answer.
(EPA photo)
In recent days Murdoch (above), the head of the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and many others, and his top executives have complained that the use of News Corp. content by search indexes, such as Google News, Microsoft and Ask.com, is tantamount to "kleptomania" and accused them of being "parasites."
Murdoch is threatening to charge for the content of its media empire on the Internet and to remove such content from any Internet search index.
Google News countered by saying any news organization is free to have its content removed from the search index by just requesting it.
The Google News response as quoted by Agence France Press:
"News organisations are in complete control over whether and how much of their content appears in search results," it said said in a statement issued in London.
"Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don't."
It added: "If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do it tell us."
Google said its news listings service and web searches were a "tremendous source of promotion" for news organisations, sending them "about 100,000 clicks every minute".
"Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don't."
It added: "If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do it tell us."
Google said its news listings service and web searches were a "tremendous source of promotion" for news organisations, sending them "about 100,000 clicks every minute".
Murdoch is also after the fair use doctrine, which argues that the Internet would be deprived of its very reason to exists if aggregators (such as us) would be kept from linking to other pages or sites.
"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," threatened Murdoch.
All the huffing and puffing by the Murdoch empire seems to have popped up after its heavy investments into Internet social networks, such as MySpace, have failed to respond to expectations.
Also, building firewalls to keep the Internet's traffic controllers from driving users to your content sounds like a lose-lose proposition, no matter how powerful News Corp. may be.
The New York Times, and many copycats after it, tried this approach once before and after a resounding failure, it went back to open access again.
We believe the Internet is not the newspaper slayer it has been portrayed to be, especially in the US, whose newspaper industry is undergoing the worst crisis in its history.
In fact, we believe the Internet is a transformational force of unprecedented proportions. The challenge is to learn how live and prosper with it.
In other words, war is not the answer.
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