|
By Caroline McCarthy
news.cnet.com
February 28, 2010
A new profile of septuagenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch says that the News Corp. chief is ready to press legal action against Google if talks fail with the search giant over indexing content.
In a lengthy article in New York magazine that hit the Web late on Sunday, writer Gabriel Sherman quotes a source high up in the media industry echelon who says Murdoch is "pretty tightly wound up over Google and has been ready to sue them...He doesn't trust them at all." The lawsuit, presumably, would come if Google refused to stop indexing News Corp. search results without paying a fee for them.
Google representatives were not immediately available to provide a reaction.
The article also makes note of the reports that began spreading late last year that Murdoch was in talks with Bing, Microsoft's fledgling search engine, over a potential exclusive deal wherein News Corp. content would appear in Bing search results but not Google's or any other search engine. Some reports suggest Microsoft may be willing to help with the removal process.
Google makes it possible for companies to easily pull their content from search results but coyly makes it clear that doing so could result in a huge drop in traffic and hence advertising revenue. In order for Murdoch to pull News Corp. content from Google successfully, he would likely have to convince the heads of other media companies to do the same.
Murdoch, meanwhile, has talked about individual Web users also paying for News Corp. content. The Wall Street Journal, which the company acquired in 2007, is already behind a pay wall and has fared much better than some of its print-media brethren in the aftermath of the global advertising recession.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10461255-93.html
|
