Murdoch Vs Google: Round 2 Begins!

Wed Apr 14 12:00:00 IST 2010, by Abhishek Mehta

Obama's two-day "Nuclear Summit" comes to an end and "dirty bomb" took the center stage. Though world leaders were worried about the nuclear proliferation, netizens were concerned about the dirty pay-wall bomb in the hands of Rupert Murdoch & company. Murdoch is sounding war cry again on the content aggregators and the search engines like Google and Microsoft.

Oops!...I Did It Again. Rupert Murdoch at US National Press Club event in George Washington University this week said:

"We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing.. there is a law of copyright and they recognize it," "They take [news content] for nothing. They have got this very clever business model," said this Australian American media mogul. **

So, here is the deal. Coming June, The Times and The Sunday Times, Murdoch's group holding in UK are going behind pay-wall, 1 pound a day or 2 pounds for a week's subscription. Wall Street Journal (WSJ) : also part of Murdoch's media empire, is currently the only major US newspaper charging readers for full access online. Murdoch has hailed launch of iPad as savior of newspaper industry and "The Savior" means "The Money Churner". To coincide with the launch of iPad, "The Australian" (Murdoch again), will be available as an app and "it would probably be charged as a monthly subscription", said the paper's deputy chief executive Nick Leeder. Wall Street Journal already offers an iPad edition, free to download, but requires a monthly subscription of US$17.30.

There is a saying in India, "When wheat is crushed to the flour, small stones are also powdered". This clearly states the position of Netizens in this clash of titans. Apathy is detailed in an earlier blog of mine - Murdoch Vs. Google: None can win, netizens will loose.

Murdoch: It's my way or no way

Well, Yes! he did warned us many times. Last time in December 2009, he diagnosed search engines like Google with "content kleptomania". Point of contention - the adverts that Google shows on the right hand side of search results. Google earns revenue from such adverts. Murdoch's content plays an important role in Google search results/news, but these web searchers do not fit into his new subscription based business model. So, logically it makes sense for Murdoch to ask for money from Google or turn off the digital tap.

Google shrugged off these comments very same day, nearly saying "we do not care". But their actions told a different story altogether. In January of 2010, Google "REACTED" to the needs of paid content publishers. Consider this as change of heart or survival compulsion, under the program name "First Click Free" (More...).

"First Click Free" is a program where the news publishers will allow their content to be indexed by Google crawlers even for the subscription-based content. Thus allowing netizens to search this content through Google searches. To address the publisher's concerns there are two paths in this program. First user click will be treated as free and Googler will be given access to the whole article. If the Googler navigates the publishers website after this link, publisher can ask for login or registration. But if the Googler click on more than 5 times on a publishers website from Google aggregator in a single day Google will forward such request to the registration page by itself.

Round 1, Round 2 ..

"First Click Free" is what I call "Murdoch Effect". He won the round one, Associated Press' Chief executive; Tom Curley was also on his side. Online media around the world was making losses and recession clouds were dark everywhere. So, every content provider suddenly rose to the occasion asking for his share in the bounty.

Round 2 of this battle seem to be more tilted towards Murdoch again. Launch of iPad and success of Apple's products are tilting the game in his favor, as Steve Jobs and himself are buddies (with common enemies). Apple has distanced himself from open sources, freebies and contributing communities, it seems to be a logical allay for Murdoch. Fate of round 2 is still unclear but Netizens are unlikely to be the winners here.

Silver lining

In this clash of titans, we (netizens) have won very unlikely support from various head of states. Gordon Brown, The British PrimeMinister seems to be vocal and going netizen's way. Well, he is heading for general election in few weeks and probable want to get some mileage out of British netizens. Guess who is the next supporter, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, owner of media empires, and Murdoch is his nemesis. And at last the Fijian Dictator- Voreqe Bainimarama, who want to grab his national newspaper from Murdoch hands- for personal propaganda of course. But I wonder if it is already too late and too little for netizens.

No one knows if Murdoch's policies will win or loose. One thing, which is for sure, is that the paid-walls are not going to help Internet growth and parity. So, "We The Bloggers" have more responsibilities to fulfill in this new world order.

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Posted at 08:30PM Apr 14, 2010 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[0]