[bigbob]

I agree. Murdock is within his rights to expect to be compensated for content that he pays people to create. That’s fair. But it’s also fair that he ought to take some precautions to protect his property. If he were to block Google, put them on notice that he will only remove the block if they agree to pay for content, and they still take it for free, then he may have a reason to go after them.

Someone has to pay to create web (or any other) content, it doesn’t “just happen”. The precedent is clear, you can’t go record ABC news for example, and charge people to watch it. The media is evolving but in the end, it will still work, or new content creators will replace the existing ones.

[ThunderSleeps]

That's the thing with most of these big legacy news sources - they want the $, but they are desperately unwilling to take themselves and their content out of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. They know it is the big search engines that bring people to their sites, get them hits and advertising $.

[Tullius]

he doesn’t evcen have to “block” google.

Google fully respects the contents of a site’s robots.txt file - which is akin to putting up a friendly notice at the entrance that soandso (or veery robot) is not welcome there.

One line of text in that file on each of his sites, and Mr Murdoch’s content will completely vansih from Google over the course of the next weeks.

A nice letter to Google would also do the trick as well.

Murdoch is just a bloviating fraud here.

[FastCoyote]

[If he were to block Google, put them on notice that he will only remove the block if they agree to pay for content, and they still take it for free, then he may have a reason to go after them.]

But if you block Google, which is where I get most of my research, you have zero traffic. So, good luck with that Rupert.