Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works

Hugh Pickens writes "The Financial Times reports that Microsoft is in discussions to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, to 'de-index' its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. Microsoft is desperate to catch Google in search, and, after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, Bing, launched in June, marks its most ambitious attempt yet. Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. 'This is all about Microsoft hurting Google's margins,' said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan. 'It's easy to believe that [Microsoft] may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google,' writes Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing. 'Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either; he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.'"

Comments

say and do

[Tom]

I'm pretty sure that Murdoch will hate M$ for this step. No, I'm serious.

He's in the publishing industry. In other words: Perception and stories are his trade. The whole "Google is stealing from us" angle is an excellent story and contains a number of great opportunities to profit (from the government if you threaten loss of jobs, from Google if you threaten lawsuits, etc.) - but what M$ is doing is essentially calling his bluff.

Now he'll either have to go along with it, and de-index his sites, which will result in page views coming down crashing, or have everyone and his dog dig out the old stories and say "wasn't so bad after all, was it, old liar?".

He's probably already busy trying to find a way out without loss of face.

Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed

[tibman]

You know what would be funny? Google should remove all of murdoch's news sites from the index and say "We took the liberty of removing the sites, like you've been publicly talking about". If he wants them back he'll have to publicly ask to be reincluded. That should make his intentions clearer.

Re:no matter the mocking

[h4rm0ny]

It may be different in other countries but in the USA and the UK, the act of linking itself is not a problem. There might be cases where it is, e.g. if you say "the following people are peadophiles" and then link to a list of home sites, but these are all as relevant to the legality of linking itself as the illegality of murdering someone with a hammer is to the legality of hammers.

Now if you're doing other things, such as caching the sites content and perhaps displaying it in a different format, then things become more confused. Google displaying the first few lines of a search result? Fair use in the USA. The UK doesn't have "fair use" as such, but I doubt a case would get very far and, more to the point, no-one would bother bringing such a case. The thing is, it's pretty easy to add a robots.txt file to your site and Google respects these. Laws would only have to made to deal with this area of technology if it were onerous or in dispute - e.g. a site owner has to keep track of hundreds of different "don'tcrawlmebro" files, or they're horribly complicated, or Google or Bing or whoever refuses to respect them or caches more than site owners feel is fair.

At present, things are working nicely so there hasn't been much impetus to create laws dealing with this area. Murdoch would be happy to bury this area in laws, of course. His interest is against an open commons and in favour of a model that involves lawyers and money. He has lots of both, you see. The threat to him is not his business rivals stealing his customers, but his customers no longer needing him.