Newspaper titan Rupert Murdoch has announced that he will attempt to try to remove his content from Google’s search results and other search engines as well. The purpose of such a move, he explained, would be to promote the practice of paying for online content. The company plans to lead the media industry in this direction.
This move by the media guru Murdoch represents another link in the chain of events surrounding the debate over paid-for versus free online content, and how the future of online news may depend on more paid-for content.
Murdoch has expressed his adamant support for the fight against the free use of newspaper content. His plan is to implement paywalls on news sites as early as next summer. He had this to say about the planned Google blockage: “I think we will [remove our websites from Google's search index] but that’s when we start charging, the people who simply just pick up everything and run with it — steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”
In the past few months, Murdoch has accused search giant Google of “kleptomania”, as well as calling the company a ‘parasite’.
The Wall Street Journal requires users to pay for content. When a non-subscriber goes to the site, they are shown the first paragraph of each article, followed by a statement explaining that the user must subscribe to the site in order to view the rest of the article. However, if the user clicks on the same article through Google’s News pages, they are usually offered the entire story without any subscription block.
This is possible because of Google’s First Click Free program, where anyone coming through Google has to be admitted to see the actual article. However, according to a recent article by Search Engine Land, First Click Free is not required – it is possible to opt out of the program and still be included in Google’s search results.
The doctrine that Murdoch plans to challenge is the fair use doctrine. They plan to take the issue that search engine’s use of news content in their search results falls under the fair use doctrine, which they are hoping to bar altogether.
Murdoch has announced that he plans to introduce charges for all of his news sites, but it’s unclear when that might happen.
The debate is likely to be ongoing for the next few years. It is as yet unclear why Murdoch doesn’t just remove his sites from the First Click Free program, but it’s likely we’ll discover the answer soon enough.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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