Murdoch has his reasons for attack on internet
Date Published: {J}
RUPERT Murdoch has accused Google of "stealing his news", though he knows perfectly well that the search giant actually brings visitors to his websites – and to his advertising.
In his tabloid way he tries to give the impression that they're somehow doing it without his permission, even though that is actually impossible. So it's a charade. The question is, what's he playing charades for?In the 1980s,Murdochmanaged to create the greatest media empire the world has ever seen. Among many other things, he either owns or has large interests in The Times and The Sun in the uK, Sky satellite TV all over Europe, the largest satellite broadcaster in China, the Fox television networks and The New York Post in the US and now – jewel in his crown –The Wall Street Journal, key news source of the finance industry. No one person has ever had so much media influence. But . . . it's all ‘old media’.
He took his eye off the ball – perhaps he thought he was just too powerful to have to worry anymore – and failed to predict how the internet would change the game utterly.
You may wonder how it did. After all, guys who used to read The Sun on the bus or in the factory canteen aren't getting out their netbooks and checking favourite blogs instead. People read newspapers almost asmuch as they used to. The problem is not that the internet has taken away readers so much as it has taken away advertisers.One pretty eye-opening figure:In the UK, more is now being spent oninternet advertising and promotion thanon TV commercials. And of course by far the biggest provider of online advertising is Google – because they managed to predict the future and saw a way to make money from it.
Murdoch failed to, and now his empire is less profitable. So the way he sees it, Google should just give some of that money to him. (This is a man with one hell of a sense of entitlement.) Or, he threatens, he will remove his news sources from Google's search results. Now that's a ballsy bluff.
Who the hell would mind if Murdoch's news sources disappeared from their search results? I really don't give a damn about what Fox News thinks about anything. Hell, I'd consider paying a premium to get them filtered out.
Google are big enough and tough-minded enough not to give in to him. But of course, they are not the only show in town. Not quite anyway. There's Yahoo! And Microsoft Bing (yes, the unwritten rule is that search engines have to have stupid names), which you will notice Murdoch has not accused of stealing his news.They index his sites just as much as Google does of course; they just make way less money.
What I'm beginning to suspect is that Murdoch wants to cut a deal with one of these smaller rivals for exclusive rights to search his titles. It's sneaky, it's wrong, it completely undermines the freedom-of information principles of the Internet. But in a strange way I hope he gets away with it. Because by doing so, he will make himself even more irrelevant.[email protected]