12 October 2009 | Author: Katie Todd

Rupert Murdoch demands Google must pay

At a recent meeting in Beijing, media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a zealous speech in which he claimed that search engines must pay for the right to link to content on news sites.

Mr Murdoch appears to be no large fan of Google and co. as he frequently takes the chance to lambast the Mountain View giant, alongside other search engines like Microsoft's Bing, for what he calls "stealing" their web content and linking to it on their search engine result pages. According to the media colossus, search engines are thieving stories in order to shamelessly make money.

Joining Mr Murdoch was fellow news executive Tom Curley, who said at the conference: "We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission."

Mr Murdoch added: "The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content.

"But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators - the people in this hall - who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph."

However, what Mr Murdoch appears to have neglected to recognise is the small matter of how search engines like Google play a crucial role in driving huge amounts of traffic to news websites. The links displayed in the search results lead directly to the news site, displaying adverts only placed there by the website itself.

It is possible to remove a website from Google indexes quickly and easily. Whether Mr Murdoch will lead the way in doing so by taking News Corp associated sites out of the search sphere remains to be seen - but it is likely that this removal, rather than search engines, will see a more crippling effect.

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