Murdoch's Anti-Google Ploy or how to Play Nice Online

Media Baron Rupert Murdoch informed media last week that his News Corp news resources which owns huge news and information websites including The Australian, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post would be cutting a deal with Microsoft to block Google and give exclusive search results to Bing in an attempt to drive clicks away from Google's dominant search engine. Murdoch inferred that Google were stealing content stating they were "Content Kleptomaniacs" saying that they need to start paying for it.

Murdoch does have a point, however, that the NEWS services we receive today are based on a capitalist controlled consumer driven system that requires funding. Writers, services, cost and other aspects of the company need to be paid for some how. They are not a free service like abc.net.au. However I think blocking Google is a bit drastic!

On top of this online Advertising has not returned as much as first thought meaning the information services we receive for free today may change to subscription, blocking content to payed subscribers only.

A flip side to Murdoch's intention could be that if News Corp does block Google and people don't swap to Bing, then people would simply read their News from alternative free sources, especially in these hard economic times. This could give independant resources and channels a chance to win new readers and have a broader reach. Alternatively Google and News Corp could play nicely and come to some happy middle ground. Either way the changes that are happening will not stop the new generation of free information be it through search engines or the ever increasing social networking channels such as Twitter, where content providers work hard to earn their followers and advocates.

How these changes play out could severely effect the future of digital strategy and in a sense we are influencing these changes by supporting them or not. I've always said that the digital is an unpredictable medium which can't be controlled and this is a prime example.

Via: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/25/cashmore.news.corp.google/index.html

It seems Google and News Corp are friends now... here is Google CEO Eric Schmidt's response
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574569570797550520.html