Press baron Rupert Murdoch is suggesting he may take the unprecedented step of blocking Google from finding content on his News Corp. sites.
News Corp. publishes The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, the New York Post, the Sun, among other newspapers. Such a move would pit one of the largest media companies in the world against the Web’s premiere search engine.
Murdoch said the company will eventually remove stories from Google’s (GOOG) search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online, according to a story in the British Guardian, which apparently was based on an interview Murdoch did with Sky News Australia.
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The company could eventually remove its sites from Google indexes once it starts charging for additional publications online. The company already charges subscription fees for the WSJ and for Barron’s, but stories for both publications are widely available online, Barron’s pointed out.
“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” he said. “We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story - but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”
“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,” Murdoch reportedly said. “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.”
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