Rupert Murdoch vs. Google

The "battle between old media and the Web" is heating up, said Mark Trumbull in The Christian Science Monitor. Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. accused Google and other search engines of stealing his company's content by linking to it in search results without paying. Murdoch said the "content kleptomaniacs" would soon have to pay, and Associated Press CEO Tom Curley backed him up, saying content creators had waited too long to get tough.

Pay no attention to "Murdoch's macho outrage," said Weston Kosova in Newsweek. He could add simple code to his stories tomorrow, and, "poof," his content would be invisible to Google. But he won't, because Google isn't really stealing—it's providing a "free service" by posting short summaries and sending readers to newspapers and other content creators they desperately need.

So Google should call Murdoch's bluff, said Garett Rogers in ZDNet. If News Corp. and the AP won't "modify their robots.txt file to make Google ignore them," Google should do it for them and stop indexing their stories completely. "That would surely stop their complaining, right?"

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Stamping out the aggregators isn't what really matters, said Julian Goldsmith in Britain's BNET. The bottom line is that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and every other media company has to figure out how to make money in an Internet age when "everyone expects content to be free." The companies that cover news can't "go on providing content for free much longer"—because they still have to pay their reporters.