Smackdown: Google v News Corp

26/11/09 posted by Liz Niland

Following on from the fuss created by media baron Rupert Murdoch, Google News is set to lose access to a handful of US online newspapers. If you haven’t taken a peek at Google News before, it’s worth doing if only to see how ridiculous this caper has become. It almost seems as though some of Google’s critics don’t actually understand, let alone use, Google or its news portal.

Insults have flown thick and fast from the News Corp camp, with Google’s search chief accused of encouraging promiscurity online, and the poignant comment "The whole Google model is based on digital disloyalty. It's about disloyalty to creators" made by the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Thomson. Murdoch has called sites such as Google News "plagiarists" and "content kleptomaniacs", while Thomson has gone so far as to use the word "parasites".

As we blogged about previously, users sent from Google account for 25% of the WSJ’s overall traffic. As commented by Danny Sullivan, it seems as though newspapers are not doing enough to convert this traffic into regular, if not paying, consumers. The most recent development in this affair has seen Microsoft go into talks with News Corp to potentially purchase access to the news - and shut Google out from indexing it. What’s not to say Bing won’t set up its own news section - a la Google? It seems this is all merely to collect money for a floundering corporation - not for the preservation of quality journalism. It’s safe to say though - it would be an incredible coup for Bing.

As Pete Cashmore wrote “In the world of the Web, by contrast, content is abundant and distribution is virtually free. To limit distribution, then, is an attempt to seize back control.” With so many people and governments across the world rapidly recognising the power of the internet, this trend for information control seems to be counter-intuitive. If it continues to escalate, the incredible benefits of accessible, free, quality information will be lost, decreasing the opportunities for the freedom that only knowledge and an education can bring. I’ll happily have my articles encircled with advertisements if that is what it takes to maintain global accessibility.