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Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content
Hugh Pickens writes Weston Kosova writes in Newsweek that Rupert Murdoch gave an impassioned speech to media executives in Beijing decrying that search engines — in particular Google — are stealing from him, because Google links to his stories but doesn't pay News Corp. to do so. 'The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,' Murdoch says. 'But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.' But if Murdoch really thinks Google is stealing from him, and if he really wants Google to stop driving all those readers to his Web sites at no charge, he can simply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site's robot.txt file and adding 'Disallow.'"
If you don't want to be hyperlinked to, you might consider
not putting your content on the worldwide web.
Dolt.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Must be absolutely horrible having all those evil search engines actually index his pages! I guess his robots files aren't working or something.
Media companies want Google to pay, not us (consumers). Because you can charge Google $X (where X has 7 digits) whereas to get consumer money, you have to produce a useful product.
Someone should send an email explaining robot.txt to the poor guy. Maybe he's just ignorant about how to keep the big bad Google from "stealing" his content.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
There's a very simple, mutually beneficial solution to this - Google should do Mr. Murdoch a favor and stop indexing his content. It's really a win-win scenario for everyone (including readers).
-- Sig down
I think we're all going to drown in Rupert's crocodile tears.
[End Of Line]
Fuck off you pinhead. As noted: go to robot.txt file and add Disallow. Then they won't be able to steal from you. And no one will come to your fascist propaganda machine. don't like it? tough. Welcome to the 21st century.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This is Dogbert's key market segmentation group. Someone so rich and so stupid should be easy to fleece. Why is this guy still around feeding us fake news and claiming that Google driving hits to his web sites is "stealing". If his bandwidth bills are too high from all the visitors he can just shut down his sites, or as mentioned disallow search engines.
seriously, do the world a favor and die
Please Google, teach this old bag a lesson and kill all links to his website so we can no longer find any of his companies online. Do it!!! It would be a glorious day when we would be allowed to go to other news sources and let Murdoch die a slow death holding on to a fading newspaper.
He knows that by whining and dining,
he will convince the 1-candlepower legislators to pass laws to protect his virtual monopoly.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
if he really wants Google to stop driving all those readers to his Web sites at no charge, he can simply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site's robot.txt file and adding 'Disallow.
Murdoch may be a complete asshole but he's hardly stupid: I'm sure his tech people explained to him that Google respects the Robot Exclusion Protocol. All the big boys do ... not to do so would be a. sleazy and b. stupid, since there are plenty of litigious fucks like Murdoch out there. The fact that he's making such misinformed claims in apparent ignorance indicates that he has another agenda, one of which we currently know nothing. Ultimately though, I think it comes down to an outfit like Google, with the stated goal of indexing all the world's knowledge, coming into direct conflict with those who wish to restrict access to knowledge for profit. What makes matters worse for the likes of Murdoch is that Google makes its money from other sources, and is not responsive to the same motivations and perceived threats as the incumbent news organizations. If Newscorp and every other such "service" were to disappear tomorrow, it would make little difference to Google's bottom line.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
And stop linking to his sites- he deserves it. And the resulting reduction in traffic to foxnews would make the world a better place.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I bet he thinks the dewey decimal system "steals" content from libraries by classifying and categorizing books.
FLR
'The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,
Considering that Murdoch owns MySpace and markets it to artists as a place where independents, and even established artists, can show their wares - in effect aggregating boatloads of content that is not his in the first place - the irony of his whining is almost too much to bear.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Except perhaps for some of the reporters there to cover the event. Publishers create nothing. They merely manufacture and distribute. There used to be a need for the manufacture and distribution of those ink-stained pieces of paper known as newspapers. That technology is obsolete. So is Mr. Murdoch.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The file he'd have to change is robots.txt, not robot.txt
Gosh, what tragedy. Guess we'll just have to suck it up and get by without their relentlessly negative hate spew.
Don't let the search engine door hit you on the way out bunghole.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content
The only evidence of a "movement toward paid content" that I have seen is Rupert Murdoch telling people that there is a movement toward paid content.
I'm not sure why some of you think he doesn't want Google to link to him - that's not what he says at all. What Rupert Murdoch wants is for Google to link to him and pay him money for the privilege. He's smart enough to know that his media empire, from which he's made billions, is dying - but he isn't smart enough to figure out how to transform his dying business into a new type that can survive and thrive in the new electronic world (but then neither has anyone else as of yet). So he's doing the only thing he can think of, which is attempt to shift the blame over to the innovators that are responsible for his industry dying.
Now, as the old media continues to die off, I wouldn't be all that surprised to see a company like Google make an effort to build a new media company with paid reporters and the like - but there's absolutely no reason that would involve someone like Rupert Murdoch, since he'd basically be relegated to the role of unnecessary middle-man.
#DeleteChrome
This story is a good example why people like Mr. Murdock running huge companies should really, really keep their mouth shut about things they are clueless. Unfortunately for Mr. Murdock, he has more than a pocket full of quarters to buy a clue how search engines work; but instead of buying a clue, he would rather stick them up his nose.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Can I pay somebody to make sure I never have to listen to anything he or any of his media outlets says? There's a business model for you.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Riddle me this: What happens if EVERY news company/website starts to charge for access? People will be FORCED to pay for online access because there is no other option. This is what Murdoch wants; every content producer to start charging, so they can ALL charge. It is basically a charge for convenience, and it only works if everyone does it. Hence his hysterical invective trying to get everyone on his train. Hopefully no one buys in (no pun) to his scheme or we'll all be the worse for it.
But if Murdoch really thinks Google is stealing from him, and if he really wants Google to stop driving all those readers to his Web sites at no charge, he can simply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site's robot.txt file and adding 'Disallow.'"
He would also have to find a way to prevent Google from linking to his competitor's news stories, else the playing field would become uneven, giving a competitive advantage to the first publisher who folds. It's the prisoners dilemma game. They all fold and die slowly instead of being the patsy and being hung at dawn.
Technically he is right. And Google really do take without providing anything back. Does anyone think that their attempted (legal) theft of so-called abandoned works from a court order (a single judge deciding the fate of millions of works) was a good thing? Only those who are in bed with them would think that.
I do not see Google as heroic. What they do is coopt everyone else and provide tools that remove our privacy and allow for spambots.
If they are so good then let them release it all into the public domain. Oh, no. They want control. Open source? Hardly.
And PS we don't have a choice but to deal with them. Everything you hate about oversized corporations and more. Viacom will win their suit
Google and other self-interested indexers should blacklist News Corp. They need to make an example out of someone like Murdoch by not only delisting them from their indexes, but making it a permanent ban as in they cannot apologize, plead, etc. Their. Content. Will. Not. Ever. Be. Indexed. Again.
Google should stop indexing his content. When his traffic falls 50% overnight he'll be offering to pay them.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Linking does not involve copying, therefore his claim about copyright is void. He'd be laughed out of court.
User-agent: * /printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream /printer_friendly_story /google_search_index.xml /google_news_index.xml /*.xml.gz
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml
Google, please stop linking to Murdock and his precious content. As an added bonus, can you modify all existing indexes to redirect Fox News Links to NPR. Thanks
Technically he is right.
No, he isn't.
And Google really do take without providing anything back.
Bullshit. As the summary stated: if Newscorp really was the victim here, they'd implement a robots.txt file telling Google to go away.
The problem is that if Google went away, Newscorp would lose business.
The rest of your post is even more idiotic than your first two sentences. (Come on, legal theft? If it was theft, it wouldn't be legal, asshat.)
You have every choice not to deal with them. It's perfectly possible to do without - there are other search engines, other webmail providers, other banner networks. If you have a website, you can even exclude them in your robots.txt if you want.
And see if he gets the message. If that doesn't work, try once every three days, etc
Anyone else notice the irony of Murdoch giving this speech from a communist country that does its damnedest to stifle free speech, restricts access to the internet and controls the press?!?
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
He's saying that Google is stealing from him. If there's a 16 byte method to stop this, and he's not doing it, this suggests he doesn't actually believe what he is saying, so he's a bald-faced liar.
My suggestion to people and organisations who don't want to be linked to or indexed is to a) use the technical tools available to guide said activities and if that's not enough, b) get off the fucking internet .
No doubt if google dropped EVERYTHING of his into their black hole (thereby "stop stealing"), he'd sue them for that!
Bookmark that speech, it'll come useful in the future.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I think what irks me is that this guy wants to make money off content that is essentially news and at one time considered a responsible representation of reality. Its not artistic what his organizations create, but a rendering in text and images of something that really happened, that is not anyones' property.
Inverse advertizing suggests like others note above that what he says is not what he means and that another agenda is in play.
How much of what he peddles is not a repeat from AP? Well, the spin namely. The only thing unique about Newscorps and others just like it is precisely the distortion. And the only way this distortion may be balanced or canceled out is in a universal index.
Go Go Go
Google! And slashdot...nice responses folks!
"There you go again".
Please, please, please make this happen. There must be some hacker reading Slashdot who can get into say, Fox (Not) News and keep it from being indexed. You would be doing the world two big favors: showing that Murdoc is a cynical evil self serving blowhard and removing the source of mental toxic waste that is FOX NEWS! The morons who are addicted to that style of political porn can still get as much as they want, and people with function brains can be saved the trouble of skipping their irrational content. I'm tired of looking at Google News and having to check to see if the link is to Fox before I read the article.
Murdoch may be a complete asshole but he's hardly stupid:
You're falling into the trap of thinking that success in high places must mean competence. The world isn't nearly that sane. So long as the guy hires smart people and is smart enough not to put too many obstacles in their way, that's smart enough.
Being an asshole however does seem to be a pre-requisit to great wealth. If you're fair to everyone and share your wealth, you simply never get rich enough for people to know your name. (You may make enough to live comfortably and have a good life, but you won't get rich and people will try to take advantage of you).
There's also the illusion that if you're bad tempered and mean you're getting ahead because you "don't put up with crap" and "don't suffer fools" and "don't get emotional when it comes to the tough decisions". In reality you're just a lucky arsehole whose only talent is in exploiting people.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I don't doubt you're right, It's just that I don't see any statements highlighting it.
If your company's only product is information, it is difficult to make money on the Internet. Wikipedia is funded by a non-profit organization. Youtube is hemorrhaging money. Facebook, MySpace, and Slashdot are ad-supported.
It is a difficult problem of our times how traditional news media can survive with the expectations we have of the internet. It is another difficult problem how one can combat news institutes that have contempt for real journalism and become institutes for advocacy.
While we figure out how to solve the first problem, we can use the first problem to help against the second. In the end, we're best off both with FoxNews/SkyNews gone and traditional journalism revived and (somehow) funded.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
The real problem is simply answered. Can I, through the use of Google obtain Rupert Murdoch's content without ever visiting his site or seeing ads on his site?
If the answer is no, then someone doesn't understand.
If the answer is yes, then there is a real problem. I tend to think that the answer is yes on a couple of levels. First off, can I use a "Murdoch" headline and then read the content somewhere else? Yup, I am sure I can do that. Secondly, can I use Google to grab "Murdoch" content without visiting any of his sites? Yup, I can use the Google cache and never touch the original site.
Finally, doesn't Google show enough of the text to let me know if I really want to look at the whole article on the site?
No, this isn't anywhere near as simple as just using robots.txt to deter Google from indexing. This is using a service from Google to preempt other sites.
Remeber that Murdoch is the guy who in the 80's busted the UK's entrenched print unions by modernising the Fleet street presses.
He doesn't want Google or anyone else to stop linking or he would have already stopped them by technical means, what he wants is a slice of Google pie, the bigger the slice the better. If he thinks ordinary people can't see through his feigned "push for paid content" then his sense of entilment must be at least an order of magnitute larger than his media empire.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I think what Rupert wants is not to prevent Google from indexing their content, but instead getting them to pay to more or less syndicate it. Rupert knows that cutting off Google is basically suicide, because Google almost is synonymous with the web as we know it.
Anyway, I notice that Foxnews has explicit instructions for Google's crawler. Whatever.
http://www.foxnews.com/robots.txt
User-agent: * /printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream /printer_friendly_story /google_search_index.xml /google_news_index.xml /*.xml.gz
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml
It is very clear that Murdoch would put Google on trial if Google removed his web sites from the results of its search engine (that would be a kind of intolerable discrimination and would cause a loss of profit). Murdoch doesn't really want his web sites to be removed from Google, he wants Google to continue to advertise his web sites for free. Wait, maybe he wants Google to pay for keeping the right to publish these links.
Rupert Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal. Some WSJ online content is available in full to all; some online content is marked "Subscriber Content," and is shown in abbreviated form (e.g. the leading paragraphs of the story) to non-subscribers.
Take, for example, this story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125503764592374389.html
Unless you are a WSJ subscriber, you will be shown a preview of the story once you click the link. For comparison, search for the title of the above story ("Glaxo's Big Bet on Battling Pandemics") on Google News. You will see the full article once you click the link.
The URL of the story is identical in both cases. I suspect that WSJ displays the full version of the story when the referrer is determined to be news.google.com. If slashdot.org were to link to the same story, I suspect that only a preview would be shown. If that is the case, then WSJ rewards traffic from Google News.
Please make your own conclusions as to how this colors Rupert Murdoch's speech.
Also, please enjoy subscriber-exclusive WSJ content for free through Google News.
Google Bot respects the robots.txt file... Rupert, use it or shut the fuck up.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: * /printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream /printer_friendly_story /google_search_index.xml /google_news_index.xml /*.xml.gz
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml
His son has been ranting on about the BBC and how it hurts 'real' journalism because of the unfair competition http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8229779.stm
This is an awesome article by Charlie Booker about Murdoch's son.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/sep/05/charlie-brooker-on-james-murdoch
quote:-"he's the son of Rupert Murdoch, which makes him the closest thing the media has to Damien from The Omen."
All I can say is thank f^ck for BBC news and Google.
Rupert Murdoch: Today's worst person ... in the wooooorld!
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Reminds me of the time that someone threatened to sue me for a copyright violation after I linked to several pages in a site that had been archived on the wayback machine (it was a series of web articles that the author had decided to publish in book form.) I had lots of fun contemplating how their internet lawyers would have accomplished that, especially since the smarter thing to do would have been to request that the wayback machine stop archiving their site. Can someone please explain to Mr. Murdock how the Series Of Tubes actually works?
In 1998 the DMCA added rules to the United States Code (17 U.S.C. 512) that relieves system operators from copyright liability for the purposes of caching. Source: wikipedia page on web caching.
Google should block every fucking IP address the fucking asshole has any stench on. All of it AND google should ban every fucking website that has even a hint of a link to his stench.
Fuck this ignorant neo-Luddite up the ass.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Afterall, he is making some specific charges here. I'd like to see his ass handed to him in court although I know the fine or whatever it is probably will be insignificant.
Please stop linking and displaying ANY AND ALL of murdochs content. Please. Stop with Fox news. Stop it all.
Then lets hear what Murdoch has to say.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm Howling Mad Murdoch, get off my lawn or I'll shake my fist at you again!
I'd figure that he'd be HAPPY that Google is providing more eyes for his content! Instead he's bitching about it???!!! This reeks of AT&T blaming Google for stealing their bandwidth when AT&T's paying Internet customers go to the Google web page.
That's like saying "Google has the natural right to spy on everyone's life, but if I really don't want Google to spy on me, I can beg for it."
Is there any way we can not hear his garbage?
Oh wait... he owns multiple news/tv channels... and most radio stations... many record labels....
I guess the internet is the only place he doesn't have extensive control over... yet.
I'm just curious in a country that (pretends to, when convenient) fosters competition and is supposed to fight monopoly/oligopoly, how we permit one man to control so much media.
With all the papers and mags closing, now is the time to start a true digital only news source. If the three of them would start a company and have them do news all over the world, they could shut down the likes of whiney little murdochs. Basically, Murdoch has not figured out how to run a PROFITABLE business on-line. BUT, the big three probably can do it. Ideally, they would provide the news on much lower-cost digital readers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
He obviously has no grasp of the basics. Perhaps one of us here could modify his root to prevent all unauthorized content distribution. This reminds me of the time before translations of the bible became commonplace. The church wanted only LATIN skilled clergy to read the bible. Even though the content creation was Jewish and was often mistranslated from ancient Hebrew. Sea of reeds separated by Mose's Cane OR red sea separated by a man with a stick. What's the difference? Walking on water, no problem! Curing cataracts telekinetically with mud in your eye, no problem! At some point the babel phenomenon starts and they can't tell a Cane from an Able.
One should also note that not only does Newscorp NOT turn away Google spiders with robots.txt, they actually redirect them to Google-specific pages to reduce bandwidth and make it easier to parse.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Rupert Murdoch is an idiot who represents an industry that is slow to adapt to the new media culture. Plus the fact that he's a total right wing shill, I really have to take everything coming out of news corp with an enormous grain of salt.
All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and n
NewsCorp is too small for its bankruptcy to have significant financial impact
News Corp is the second biggest company that owns an MPAA studio, after Disney. It's bigger than Sony Electronics and Sony's authorship divisions (Sony Music, Sony Pictures, PlayStation, SOE) put together.
http://www.newscorp.com/robots.txt:
This appears to allow all crawlers. Like TFA says, if Murdoch really thinks Google is stealing, then disallow them. Its the logical equivalent to a "No Trespassing" sign. If Google continues to index the contents, then News Corp has a leg to stand on.
So, Rupert, put up or shut up. Lets see how much traffic you've got left after you block search engines. What's even better; Google blocks News Corp on its end. If there's a drop in their traffic and associated ad revenue, then Google might have a claim to collect some $$ from News Corp. Of course, that would be "doing evil". But maybe a bit of evil is justified for the greater good.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, Does he really have a choice not to deal with them? Seriously?
If he tells off Google, he looses money. See, this is the challenge with Google the benevolent monopoly. If he rejects Google, he looses. So, though Google isn't doing anything malicious, his options are either "play by google's rules" or "go out of business". Granted, he's a dirtbag, but he does have a point.
A better solution would be for robots.txt (or a more secure equivalent) to allow google to know that they need to pay when their results come up in your search results. Of course, google will require the searcher (eg you) to pay to see those results. A simple click through would work ("click here to see this pay-per-view result - your account will be debited $0.01c"). Add another link at the top (and bottom) of the results for "Never, ever, show me pay-per-view search results again. It's a stupid idea and I hate it.".
The users are happy because they get to exclude search results from people who just don't get it.
Media empires will be happy because they got what they wanted (and unhappy as they go broke as they become invisible to the internet without understanding why, but that's not google's problem).
Google will be happy because all the companies that want this feature will finally stfu and go broke.
If I read #295707815 (http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1400183&cid=29707815) then it becomes blatantly obvious that the existing robots.txt file format does not do enough for News Corp's websites.
There needs to be more innovation here, to enable more settings to be put in robots.txt and perhaps allow it to talk to google's web crawler and specifically instruct it about whether to cache content or not, etc.
It's not like it's hard to keep your paid content from being crawled by search engines.
Robot.txt file would be one place Rupert could handle them, but maybe Google should just turn off Rupert Murdock's content and then listen to him squeal for unfair practices.
You know what, I know most of the staff at google, yahoo, M$, et al are slashdot readers... So... Hey Guys... please update your code to OMIT all of Murdoch's companies web sites from ALL of your indexes.... Drop them to last place. Don't show ANYTHING from them ANYWHERE... and see how long it takes for them to beg you to include them again...
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
You might want to consider breaking your, er, writing up into paragraphs. If you want anyone to read your posts, anyway.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Interestingly the robots.txt file on rotten tomatos (a newscorp asset) specifically allows root Google access
--
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: * /license/export/ /search
Disallow:
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/siteIndex.xml
--
Good god, who let you near your parent's keyboard? That is the most absurd sequence of error-based thinking I've seen today and I've even been trolling the moonbat sites.
You don't have any idea how the Internet works, do you?
To stop or at least charge a company for what is essentially free advertising is... Well...
Bullet, Meet foot, Foot this is bullet....
Wonder what the Shareholders will say when they see the advertising revenue drop like a rock because the number of viewers drops 50% when these site stop linking to them.
i post when i post, if you don't like it than don't use the Internet.
It's pretty interesting that all of the focus here is on Rupert Murdock, whose politics don't exactly dovetail with those of the Slashdot crowd. TFA also mentioned (and quoted) the concurring opinion of Tom Curley, who was president and publisher of USA Today and is now president and CEO of the AP. Where's the seething hate for Curley, USA Today, and/or the AP? Surely they are just as worthy of derision. Why not suggest that the AP's content also be pulled from Google, or that the AP update their robot.txt file to prevent Google's indexing them? The focus on Murdock indicates that almost all are either too dumb/lazy to RTFA or so biased that they focus only on someone whose opinions they disagree with. Either way, such a lack of inquiry and balance shows that the average Slashdot reader/commenter has more in common with average Fox News viewer than he or she would like to admit.
Does that mean it will be safe to read the news at Google without clicking accidentally a Faux Newz link? That is AWESOME!!!
Who the f#ck reads fox news?
he does not want Google to stop linking to and indexing content on his web sites, he wants Google to pay for linking to and indexing content on his web site. He does that by stating in the DMCA that his articles are copyrighted materials and that web search engines that link to them and index the words of those copyrighted materials are illegal because they didn't license the content.
This is really no different than what the MPAA and RIAA do to people on Youtube and other video sites that use song and movie clips as part of people's own projects and videos. They take them down, or sue them for damages.
I think Mr. Murdoch knows how the Internet and Google works, but the robots.txt advice isn't really helping and just adding noise to the debate. Mr. Murdoch does not want to block Google access to his web site, because he wants Google and other search engines to drive visitors to his web site like any other web site corporate owner would want. But this is where it takes a strange twist, Murdoch wants Google to pay for each link and web cache of every one of his corporation's articles. If that happens and the court rules in his favor, other companies will want Google, et all to pay to index and link to their content and then Google and other search engines will go out of business or change their business model to allow 25 searches a day via IP address and registered user, and then unlimited web searches for paying members for premium web searching access starting at $35 a month and $55 a month without the advertising and pop-ups and then $100 a month to not have bandwidth capped to a slower speed plus the no advertising and pop-ups, etc. Forcing Google out of the free web search service and into a commercial business plan.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Well, I guess most of you afraid of Fox News, but it keeps us right wing people, with out guns, happy. Because it competes with the left leaning CNN. Neither are real news, but if you take -1 and +1 you get 0, so between watching both you can figure it out of your self 90% of the time. I know fox is right, but like it better than CNN, because CNN and the libs seem to not like us guys in uniform.
I run a small business and I was getting by okay. Then a few years ago, some jerk took out a huge billboard on a prime area in the city, advertising my shop, paying for the whole thing out of his own pocket, and more than that, this clown updates his billboard all the time to tell everyone about various specials and deals my shop offers. I didn't ask him to do this, he just does it. So now I'm getting more business than I ever imagined I would and making money hand over fist. The nerve of that guy!
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
"/Dear/ Mr. Murdoch,
In wishing to completely and speedily address your worries, we have permanently removed all domains owned by your corporation from our search index. You will now no longer suffer from an onslaught of non-paying visitors to your sites. With the best wishes, Google."
They should stop fucking around. Murdoch and the other paid-content-idiots know they can't do business without the search engines linking to them, and if they don't, it's high time they learned it. They need the search engines more than the search engines need them.
You might want to consider breaking your, er, writing up into paragraphs. If you want anyone to read your posts, anyway.
Holy crap, that was a post? I thought I had some line noise there for a bit. Which would be darned impressive since I'm on DSL nowada^!51
66666FF
+++ NO CARRIER
If Murdoch didn't want his content linked by Google, he could simply use a robots.txt--specifically against Google if he so chooses.
What he really wants is to force Google to share some of their revenue regardless of whether he provides any value or not, effectively based simply on the amount of content he puts on the web. Unfortunately, media companies in Europe are used to this kind of government-sponsored gravy train: music and book publishers already get their cut of a mandatory tax on blank media and devices, and they want more as their revenues are inevitably shrinking.
This kind of mixing of government and corporations is, sadly, the beginnings of fascism again. Italy seems the furthest along, but Britain, Germany, and other nations are on the same path. If business coughs in Europe, European governments are jumping.
And it should, because we are FAR better served as a country by having professional journalists and bloggers, than by having bloggers alone.
If you compare the education of the top journalists and the top bloggers, the top bloggers are better educated. They probably also actually work in the fields that they are writing about.
The sooner we get rid of the career path of "journalist" and the career option of "full time paid reporter", the better for all of us. I want to get my news from people who are actually professionals in the field they are writing about, who are on the ground and involved, not from someone who derives his power from a superficial understanding and being able to string together a few nice phrases.
The guy isn't stupid. He's trying to portray Google in this way in order to exert political pressure in Europe and take advantage of anti-Google sentiment in European politics.
What he really wants is for governments to funnel more money to him, just like they are already funneling money to music, journal, and book publishers from media and device sales.
The fact that he could stop Google with a robots.txt file if he so chose doesn't matter. In fact, he would continue to make these claims even if Google unilaterally excluded all of Murdoch's properties from indexing (he'd probably sue them for damaging his business on top of stealing from him then).
The fact that he's making such misinformed claims in apparent ignorance indicates that he has another agenda, one of which we currently know nothing
His agenda is simple: he wants money. More to the point, he wants companies like Google to be forced to pay him money simply for putting pages on the web. That's the way it already works (effectively) for music and print. Other businesses are also kept afloat by effectively government mandated licensing fees. And with European anti-Google sentiments and no European competitor, he has a good chance of getting it.
I would like to be able to disable all of Murdoch's crap from Google search results and Google news. Google really needs to add opt-out tools that make that simple, treating Murdoch's results like pornography.
Actually, it could be beneficial for marketshare to allow google to link to murdock content without it being financially beneficial. Murdoch may choose not to use robots to block google from linking because he wants more reader/viewers for fox/wsj/etc.
The other side is that the amount of money google may lose from not linking may be material to their financial statements. If Murdoch is in position to gain while google is in position to lose from not paying him off to link to him, it would stupid of google (read - open google to massive shareholder lawsuits) to block them or not pay. You don't become a media mogul by not being able to complete a cost-benefit analysis, and it is quite likely that Murdoch has determined that this will end in his favor.
Hey annoying copycat point repeating thoughtless slashdotters, just because you have an option doesn't mean you should take it. Next time you post, think beyond robots.txt and think like a businessman for business decisions (if you are a woman, and didnt think of this, based on the fact that no one else did, you should still think like like a businessman. No businessperson did.)
Oddly enough your response to the parent was so profoundly rude I actually found myself feeling sympathetic to Murdoch.
(Come on, legal theft? If it was theft, it wouldn't be legal, asshat.)
There are many examples of actions which are quite blatantly theft yet remain legal (the abuse of eminent domain laws is a clear example which has come up multiple times here on /.).
And honestly what was gained by calling him an asshat? Isn't that the same kind of ad hominem non-sense that people like Murdoch have used to dumb down our political and social discourse?
journalism was invented when print technology was the opportunity to arbitage information. The channel for this information was expensive - lots of postage, horses, carrier pigeons and sailing ships. Newspapers consolidated this information into neat bundles filtered according to readership. The source of almost all this information were letters from all over the known world.
The authors of these letters were in the main ordinary people writing to friends. Thus was born the correspondent. Most of them wrote long rambling tracts about stuff few people had any interest in. So the similarity to bloggers is obvious. They were not paid for their material which newspaper ran often verbatim.
Competition soon created professionals who wrote stuff worth reading that was entertaining. But now the channel is free, almost everyone has camera in their phone and we only really need professionals to shepherd the information. Apparently 17 year old kids can do that (in Europe,just read the news opt outs from Sky News that run during Fox News' almost ad free commercial break, to check the veracity of this statement).
Ruperts Rants are just the anguished growl of a dinosaur trapped in tar pit of technological change that a half-dead wombat could have predicted (and were - people, not wombats) more than twenty years ago. The decline in print media publishing especially magazines and newspapers has been easily observed over the past fifty years.
So it shouldn't be too long before bloggers and the interweb get to ask the question:
"Would the last person to leave The Sun offices in Wapping switch off the lights?"
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
In Beijing? Isn't that the capital city of the largest pirate country in the world, which is still officially a Communist country?
Murdoch is a commie. Or rather, a commiefascist, in the lingo that swells his media holdings like Fox "News" Channel, NY Post, etc.
--
make install -not war
While South Africa isnt nearly as big as the States in terms of online news, the most popuplar website in south africa is in fact a news website ( source ). 24.com is a large conglomerate and own the countries biggest newspapers. It appears that they have long understood the importance of online news content
In his last weeks, my grandpa thought that "chinamen" were stealing his forks and spoons. Murdoch sounds just as crazy.
He's saying this in China?
More like Ratty Turd
I troll, I troll
ISPs are getting people to pay subscription fees to view Rupert's content! Either they should pay Rupert or block access to all his pages entirely!
After reading a bit of it I don't think that would help.
It's not the paragraphs that are the problem, (Melvile got away with that) the content screams second language over an iPhone with the "ten random cliches" site open and a large bottle of Irish Whiskey.
After seeing [sic] after one of the few correctly spelt words I was amused, not that spelling really matters much anyway on a forum like this.
Sorry to be an annoying nitpicking bastard to new500 but the "freetard" insult is as annoying here as driving two herds of pigs into a synagogue and mosque at the same time while doing something unspeakable to a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Rupert Murdoch is the scum of the Earth.
Why do i have to install and configure noscript and adblock when i go to a site, instead of they asking me politely at first visit, if i want to see their crappy ads?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Tis to be hoped that the likes of the EXCELLENT Google keep it up and fuck murdoc and his twats right out of it skint broke penniless ect ect ect ..
This is similar to authors who complain about their books getting listen in catalogs with excerpts (?) from their books, or horror of horrors, libraries.
Murdoch ain't even smart enough to come up with new idiotic complaint.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just look at the music industries desire to CHARGE for 30 second samples.
People often claim that business is more economic then goverment but fail to see that business has only one rule: get every last dime you can get.
If Murdoch had been smart, he would have build google a decade ago. Who better to search the news then the news makers. Why do we use google to find the news and not the newspapers own search engines?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As Google's help docs say and as was recently made explicitly clear in a webmaster video (on YouTube) by Matt Cutts, if you "simply" put "disallow" in robots.txt, that will keep google from going to that page. However, Google can still list it as a search results based on links from other pages. To keep it from being added as a search result in that context, you must allow Google to "read" the pages, but have a specific meta tag in each page's HTML.
Submitter, when you tried to "simply" be a jerk about it, it turns out you "simply" didn't know what you were talking about, and it "simply" backfired.
Yet another public figure who doesn't 'get' the internet.
If you want people to pay for your content, make it require a secure login and subscription.
He should thank Google, if it wasn't for search engines people wouldn't even find his site.
1. Demand money for content linked by search engines.
2. Initiate expensive legal dispute forcing search engines to stop linking content.
3. Experience drastic drop number of visitors and income loss.
4. ???
5. Profit!
The UK Times, one of News Internationals stable of newpapers, appears to have a complex robots.txt file, so they certainly know how to block Google if they wanted to. I'm sure other News International sites have similar files.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Quit your whining, Murdoch. No matter how rich and powerful you are you simply can't have it both ways. Use robot.txt to exclude Google, or STFU about it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I work for one of Mr Murdoch's successful news operations. Specifically I work on one of their flagship web sites that gets about 40 million hits a week - and has embedded a full Google search solution. We engage the services of a prominent SEO company - one that works across a lot of web sites for this organisation. The main goal of this SEO part of work is to "rank highly on Google". Not "rank highly on search engines" - specifically Google. Mr Murdoch wants his free advertising on Google, and also wants to be paid for the privilege. We all know this is just "big business w*nking". He's on a crusade to try and make some money for nothing. It still irks.
As far as I know, the traditional method to view the costs is that the subscribers pay for the journalists, and the ads pay for the distribution, etc.
This so that the actual content of the newspaper would as be free from influence from the advertisers as possible
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
He doesn't want google to stop driving browsers to his site - he just wants them to start giving him money.
See that robot.txt file?
You are THE BIGGEST IDIOT on the world. While you say you don't want that, your servers are helping Google do that. You are either a liar, or a idiot. STFU!.
Murdoch might be looking at things differently
First, he has come to the conclusion that people don't type in http://www.google.com/ to an address bar to visit Google, they're going to Google to eventually go somewhere else.
Second, he probably feels that his newspapers get a lot of web traffic. I have no idea, I'll assume they do.
Third, since he seems to own most of the major newspapers these days, he's probably convinced himself that he is an important part of the internet.
Fourth, he realizes Google is making money from these searches. He's right, of course. Google isn't a charity, and they manage to make money off search.
Fifth, if Google is making money connecting the average internet searcher with his content and making money from it, he probably wonders why he isn't seeing any of that money.
Therefore, from his viewpoint, he's spending all the money building content, but Google is making money from it. And while I'm sure his lawyers have advised him that it's legal, he's trying to figure out get a piece of that revenue.
Now I'm not agreeing with this thought process, but you can see how a businessman known for making $Billions would look at that revenue stream of Google's and try to figure out how to take it away. This is business 101 for him.
I don't think he's alone; the entire net neutrality debate is pretty much wrapped up this these types of thought processes.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
As people have pointed out several times, http://www.foxnews.com/robots.txt contains the following:
So now we just need a cracker to track down every robots.txt on News Corp's servers and change them to disallow Google's robot from spidering the site.
That way we, the readers, get what we want (Karma/poetic justice), Murdoch gets what he says he wants (Google won't 'steal' his content), and Google get what they want (a way to wash their hands of responsibility, when Murdoch goes nuts and files suit for deindexing his sites).
So, this is my silent plea to the crackers (or hackers if that'll placate their ego) of the world: Give News Corp what they want - a robots.txt that stops Google from indexing their sites.
The best bit is that it could easily take weeks or months for the people running the sites to notice the change. All they'll see is a decline in traffic (big or small).
When you tell me something I retain that FOREVER (unless I forget). Does that make me an information kleptomaniac?
Just a whole lot of shite you're talking there.
The original creator will then shut them down (perhaps even instead of demanding royalties) and it seems like the public will dance around the flames of the demolished industry as we celebrate some kind of a victory for IP, all the while dying of cancer and killing one another over dwindling fossil fuels. Our cultural priorities seem truly and heinously misplaced whenever IP is involved.
It seems (to me at least) that a lot of the socially destructive behavior associated with Intellectual Property that your noting, has longer, deeper roots into human physique...
Envy - Resentment and Justice
Just add a dash of Entitlement and your all to see apparently rational people do very unhonorable things out of spite.
He's not complaining that google directs people to his site. You have to read between the lines. He wants google to ONLY link to him. You have to put on your greedy corporate hat to see it.
You must visit the graundiad to read that piece:
Damien Thorn, offspring of Satan, was educated at Yale before inheriting a global business conglomerate at a shockingly young age and using it to hypnotise millions in a demonic bid to hasten Armageddon. James Murdoch's story is quite different. He went to Harvard.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
"it will be the content creators — the people in this hall"
I'd say the people at the media conference in that hall are senior media executives and are not the original content creators. The content creators are the people you're writing about: football players scoring goals in cup finals, poor souls surviving earthquakes, politicians making decisions. The reporters of this content are your journalists, and the editors on your papers compress these reports into what they think are readable collections. Probably the people "in this hall" are champagne swilling owners of said content processing teams. Not the content creators.
Seem to be problems at News Corp. A few weeks ago we had Murdoch fils telling us that the BBC was evil for providing a news service and so stealing their money. Now Murdoch pere says its all Google's fault. That's the trouble with these capitalists - they don't like competition.
that the meeting was held in Beijing, not say New York. A little wager is in order. We have seen how Murdoch buys citizenship to gain access to media ownership - so how long before he trades his American 'citizenship' for Chinese 'citizenship'?
A bit of irony, The Evening Standard has turned into a free paper because it could not compete against Murdochs free
The London Paper. Murdoch just sees Google as a future profit source to save his dieing print empire and is drumming up support because he can't change things alone.
I read a very apposite quotation about that just last night. Showing that some things never change, it is attributed to a journalist named Hannon Swaffer back in 1928.
"Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to".
Source: "Newspeak in the 21st Century, David Edwards and David Cromwell"
http://www.amazon.com/NEWSPEAK-21st-Century-David-Edwards/dp/0745328938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255263047&sr=1-1
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
to make his company profitable again. And he is an idiot, he can update robots.txt any time he wants to opt-out of any search engine.
RM has proved many times to be intellectually dishonest and manipulator. this is just one more instance.
Stealing from Rupert's papers is like stealing poison Ivy. We reference his work to laugh at it, point out errors, or to show an example of yellow journalism.
photosMy Photostream
Don't teach people things! Blasphemy!
I just checked out the site. You are a blogger. Hope that helps.
Therefore I can't be accused of "stealing" Rupert's news.
When I see a Fox logo (or any other of Rupert's phoney organizations) I just click on any other link available for the topic. Even an amateur blog will have more complete and honest information than Fox. Or the N Y Daily News or Post. Or any English rag unless linked by Fark. I even tend to avoid Fark-linked Fox stuff, just to avoid sending a single cent to Rupert, who is one of the most evil people on the Earth today.
Not to mention that clicking links to WSJ through the Google News referrer gives you free access to many of the articles. WSJ could simply disallow it or only show the first two paragraphs as it does when you go to the site directly. So Murdoch's complaint is especially disconnected from reality here.
Maybe it's the Google spider...
LOL.
I think Roger Cohen of the New York Times was there. The New Yorker also has printed a few unattributed pieces written in Iran recently.
Just for the record, this remark about old people hurt my feelings. Quite a lot. I'm 61, and there's enough truth in what you suggest about declining mental powers to make this extra painful.
Still, I think I'm smarter than you because I know better than to throw around gratuitous cruelty.
Suffice it to say that Murdoch is a nasty old bastard who probably was every bit as unpleasant and avaricious when he was younger.
If google just stopped indexing all his "intellectual property", he'd be laughed out of complaining about it because of his now quite public previous statements. He's already dicked himself and he doesn't even know that.
And I think google should do this NOW and set a precedent by showing these online news content complainers exactly what they are asking for. And google has another ace in the hole, it isn't that much for them to just regurgitate the AP and other feeds either, they can afford it, and could easily just wipe out most online newspapers today if they felt like it. Then they could expand from there and start pushing the better of the world wide independent blog scene. There's just no absolute need anymore to have expensive "flown in" journalists to go cover this or that news event when there are millions of people already living there all over who can write well enough to pass, who are already carrying net enabled cellphones with cameras, and want to write, primarily for funzies, and have a big interest in seeing their local "hot breaking news" covered.
Google's indexing is like getting put in the old dead trees yellow pages for free, if they went to the real yellow pages style of CHARGING for indexing for commercial sites like murdoch's news ventures, this would sort that out fast.
I hope they call his bluff and just stop indexing anything he owns just to put that cretin in his place.
.. firstly, I'd get myself checked out. How the hell did I end up working for that creepy old despot....
But secondly, I'd disallow search engines in all the robots.txt files, and then start looking for another job. Perhaps someone would be willing to hire me for being the guy who halved the traffic to his servers in mere days.
> Let's continue that line of thought. What will Google News have
> if all of the real news corporations go out of business as they
> attempt to stay in business by charging for their services? Blogs?
People fail to make a distinction between newspapers and news reporting. *NEWSPAPERS* are doomed because they pay directly and indirectly for...
- forest workers who chop down trees
- truck drivers who haul the trees to pulp & paper mills
- pulp & paper mill workers who work on converting the trees to paper
- truck drivers who haul the paper to printing plants
- printing plant employees who print the papers
- truck drivers who haul the papers to various drop points
- and the kid who picks up the papers at the drop point and delivers them to your doorstep
That's a helluva lot of overhead. In the past, newspapers used to be able to recoup this overhead by soaking advertisers, big and small, because "they were the only game in town".
- But now Craigslist has the smaller advertisers, and the big stores have their own websites.
- Here in Canada, realestate agents have their own website http://www.mls.ca/ where you can search for the type of home you want, number of bedrooms/bathrooms you want, location you want, etc, etc. I can narrow the results down to a couple of dozen homes in a few minutes. Beats the daylights out of poring through pages of homes for sale ads, 95% of which are totally wrong for me.
- If I want the latest sports scores and league standings, I can go to MLB.COM, NFL.COM, NHL.COM, etc. And unlike newspapers, I don't have to wait till Tuesday to see how standings are affected by a west-coast game on Sunday evening.
> But what where will the blogs get the news to rehash if no one is
> reporting news because they all went out of business? Crowd-sourced
> news? Come on Slashdot, throw the "big media is biased, news sucks,
> free news is better" line at me and tell me how much better news will
> be after the death of real reporting.
Let me throw a few websites at you...
- abc.com, cbs.com, nbc.com, fox.com, cnn.com, etc, etc
- bbc.co.uk, cbc.ca, etc, etc.
I repeat, newspapers are the horse+buggy of the 21st century. People didn't stop travelling when the horse faded away, they adopted newer modes of travel. Similarly, people won't stop getting news when newspapers fade away. They'll get it from electronic media instead.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Enjoy your stay.
In case you can't infer my point from the sarcarsm, what has happened is that search engines have replaced every previous middle-man that used to charge for access to content. The middle-man is only as necessary as the market makes it, and the market will choose the most efficient middle-man.
> Worse, the right wing propaganda machine would attack Google,
> claiming it had a liberal bias in its news aggregation, and was
> maliciously trying to silence conservative voices.
If Google is smart, they'll wait for the first cease-and-desist letter from Murdoch's lawyers. At that point they can publish the letter and unlink from his sites. If anybody complains, Google merely has to point to the letter.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Murdoch's real concern is that most of the actual "news" on his properties is aggregated from Reuters, Bloomberg, AFP etc. Prior to the internet he had a captive market: people had to pay a premium to the owner of the local paper (Murdoch) in either dollars or views (both senses) to see those feeds. The net effect was putting a toll gate in front of the internet. Now people who want to read the news go online without paying Murdoch's toll and access those feeds from whomever makes them available. In effect Murdoch is finding himself competing with and losing to the "Pine Bluff Commercial" and 10,000 papers like it because they're getting exactly the same product at a fraction of the cost.
RANT
These rich assholes KNOW that what Google is doing is not illegal, or even unethical. If it was they would be running for the courtroom. As it stands they would be laughed out of court as soon as an "expert" witness testified about the ROBOTs file. What they want is for their rich buddies in Washington to feel sorry for them and write a law that REQUIRES Google (and everyone else) to pay them money, whether they link to them or not. That's how all parasites live, unwanted and unneeded, off the bodies of their hosts.
These investments were mainly the build-up of a network covering a fair share of the important places of the world
Nowadays the network ist THE INTERNET and is available to everybody at low cost. So the entry barrier does not exist any more.
If Murdoch or somebody else succeeds in building a legal entry barrier to continue their dominance is yet to be seen!
Why not publish news on the Internet with a "TOP SECRET" sign - and " You are not allowed to share this information with anybody"
or - "Destroy yourself after reading this information!"
The same gross generalizations could have been applied to early interactions between labor and big industry in the US. Labor complaining and big industry saying..."If you don't like it don't work here!". Most laborers had no choice but to put up with conditions to feed their families and survive. Labor law concerns the inequality of bargaining power between employers and workers. One of the reasons unions were formed was to shift the collective bargaining power towards labor so that big business would share the proportionate value of labor contributed with the laborers. Left to their own devices they were certainly NOT interested in fair wages, safe working conditions and benefits (that costs money).
What is out of whack in the relationship is that there exists a very real inequality of bargaining power between large aggregators and individual news publishers. (UGC sites are not immune...). Murdock is vocal, rich and easy to dismiss in a forum like this one but there is still a very real problem here that needs to be addressed. The aggregators are bigger, richer and quietly consolidating more and more of the collective bargaining power. There is a movement here...perhaps, since we are all consumers standing on the outside, it is easy to dismiss. I hope the news industry is there to report on big business, food processing, or whatever other travesty when we are on the short end of the power balance.
Yeah, and about 10x as much bullshit and false rumors. Your point being?
Are you adequate?
I am the very model of a content kleptomaniac
I've information Pokemon and Haruhi and Brainiac
I've twitters blogospherical and edits Wikipediac
From Amazon to Zotero plus wiring maps of ENIAC.
I'm very well acquainted, too, with web-semantic hyperlinks
I understand equations (all the property of Wolfram, Inc)
With cameras on satellites I'm teeming with a lot of news
With many cheerful facts about the colour of your neighbour's shoes
With many cheerful facts about the colour of your neighbour's shoes
With many cheerful facts about the colour of your neighbour's shoes
I'm very good at Javascript and PHP and CLI
I know by heart the J2EE web remoting API
In short, I am a technocratic, caffeine-fueled insomniac:
I am the very model of a content kleptomaniac
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Rupert Murdoch is the real-life Charles Montgomery Burns. Seriously, who else is:
- Pure, concentrated evil
- More than old and wealthy enough to retire, but works anyways
- Wealthy and powerful enough to be feared by large governments
- Truly living in the past
- Depending on momentum and lack of competition to keep his businesses running.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
All of his good stuff was stolen, leaving only the crap he broadcasts.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Rather than engage in such whiny and wimpish behavior, it would be more useful to join the Chinese Communist Party to gain the favors one needs in what used to be referred to as a 'Commie' country, as in communist, not comedy.
Imagine that, the owner of several neo-conservative media outlets become a communist. Oligarchs will do whatever it takes to gain wealth and power. Unfortunately for Murdoch he will never be allowed to achieve what he did outside China, in China.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
I often find that if a news story on the Wall Street Journal is only viewable by premium subscribers, I can go to Google News to search for the title of the article, and I am then able to see it in its entirety...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
If you go to news.google.com you can see Murdoch is being tricky but not entirely incorrect.
A headline shows up and when you click on it you are sent to the publisher's website with its ads. However, one sentence is indeed printed, and a small version of a photo may be displayed. These are probably being done without permission.
I worked in the photo news business in the early 90s and know that photos aren't free, even if they are printed small. (For example we made a lot of money selling tons of tiny photos the same size to a magazine called AB Road.)
Of course you can't really tell, it might be that they are getting the one sentence of text and the small photos from companies they have made a deal with, maybe even the content comes from Murdoch at some point but then he loses control of it. This is a very murky area. I could certainly see news companies cutting deals with Google for more air time.
Also, no ads are actually shown on the Google News page, as far as I can see when not logged in.
The purpose seems to be to lead people to the publisher's site, and even suggest reading a similar article in more than one publication.
Murdoch probably doesn't like it when people have lots of choice to read things that aren't his.
And, he should clearly be paying Google for the work they do (and their overhead) in bringing people to his website generating ad views on his site, and not the other way around.
Google has been biding its time and taking things slow. They have been scanning in tons of dead tree books ("for search purposes"), and the next steps will be to 1) actually sell book reading to the public, and 2) sell news. A google service that downloads a customized newspaper to your e-ink tablet (which will arrive very soon) would be useful.
So Murdoch has spent all this money making an empire, but it is still a dead tree publishing empire, and that industry is not doing well. Meanwhile Google, even if it does bring in eyeballs to Murdoch's sites, is really anti-empire, offering lots of alternatives to Murdoch. Maybe he thinks he could gain loyal readers if only the clock could be turned back and Google disappeared. Instead the clock is spinning forward and he is clueless about what to do.
What he really should do is go over to Plastic Logic and buy part of their company. But he instead chooses to start a vocal war of perception, in an attempt to move public perception of Google toward the evil side. Murdoch should be building digital news services, instead he is leaving that to others.
give me an option on my igoogle account that allows me to never ever see google search results returned from any news corp domains-EVER.
I have noticed lately that the most annoying and ignorant Google News headlines originate from foxnews.com and wsj.com, etc.
"Pundits Batter Nobel Committee for Awarding Obama Peace Prize"
"Man Asked His Own Daughter for Sex on Facebook"
"How Traffic Jams Help the Environment"
I am more than happy with not viewing newscorp content until I pay - which means I will never see it - GREAT IDEA!
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Busting unions means you understand technology? No.
Anyways the point is that Google has a great opportunity now to wipe Rupert Murdoch off the internet. Wouldn't it be wonderful if he was suddenly de-listed -- at his own request. All of a sudden Fox news loses half of it's ad revenue overnight. That would be what I call mass enlightenment.
Stupidity is its own reward.
If google removes all News Corp links from its index, Ruppert will see all traffic to all of this sites drop to 0.1% of normal, in a heartbeat. He'll have no ad revenue from his sites at all, he'll have no visitors to mention. Dinosaurs like him don't belong in the modern media landscape, they, just like the music industrie, are fighting change, instead of embracing it. The problem for News Corp is that Murdoc is an old retarded extremist fart noone at news corp dares to go against. Its not that the company as a whole doesn't want to move forward, but that Murdoc doesn't want to go forward. And he doesn't listen to anyone. Remove that asshole from his position and half of the worlds media has a chance of moving forward, into the future and all the rest of the old media corps will follow.
As others have said he would have already prevented google from linking if he wanted to. He doesn't because of course he doesn't want to lose the traffic, but on his own he is not powerful enough to threaten google with the loss of access to his data. Instead if he can get a large band of media organizations to refuse access to their content with him perhaps it would be enough to make google pay for access
If you don't like it Rupert, you can either do as the OP suggests, or close down your papers, and Fox, and take your ball home. We won't miss you. Go on, clear off.
roflmao ......
lol ...
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Unless you want to be outraged because someone got a free lunch or you want to live in fear of being robbed by people with different coloured skin to you, other foreigners or teenagers or you care about policemen running around in the nude on a night out..... why would you even want it. It is frightening to see the influence when you live in a Murdoch-only state. So someone please teach him about robots.txt to stop more people from going to his sites.
Hands up anyone who didn't laugh so much while reading the first five or so lines of this story that your eyes teared up so you had to take a break in order to be able to read the last few lines?