Are Microsoft and News Corp Hatching a Very Bad Idea?
News Corp. is shooting itself in the foot, and now Microsoft may be helping to aim the gun. Today, under the category of strange bedfellows, we have the story of Microsoft possibly offering to help delist News Corp. content and sites, such as The Wall Street Journal from Google’s search index. Doing so will, as I understand it, pull the content not only from the Google index, but search results and Google News as well. This, as Rupert Murdoch sees it, is progress. For months, Murdoch has been telling anyone who will listen that Google News and other aggregation sites are going beyond the Fair Use Doctrine. His plan, already well under way, is to gate content like The Wall Street Journal and only allow paying subscribers to read the stories online (it’s actually been this way for a while, but until recently, you could get around the gate by searching for WSJ stories in Google News). I understand the desire, if not the act, of gating content especially in today’s print-snuffing economy.
