Google's Evil Empire: Are Murdoch and Microsoft Now the Good Guys?
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Newscom; AP Photo Suddenly Murdoch and Microsoft are the good guys against the Google Evil Empire. Douglas Rushkoff says the two oft-despised companies are the best hope to defeat the search giant—and save the content business.
Discussions between Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a structure where the former’s search engine (Bing) would pay for exclusive rights to the latter’s content (Wall Street Journal, Fox, etc.) has proven instantly upsetting to the self-appointed defenders of a "free" Internet. The simple reason: it might just work.
Defying the logic that everything is more valuable the higher it climbs on Google's search rankings, Rupert Murdoch is making good on his threat to pull out of Google searchability, altogether. Instead, he wants to be paid for his properties to show up in search results. And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may be desperate enough for a competitive advantage against Google to take Murdoch up on the deal, and offer it to other media companies with content people really want to find.
We can't confuse our actual right to make and distribute content freely with Google’s perceived right to freely exploit the content everyone makes.
• Douglas Rushkoff: Murdoch to Google: Search This • Douglas Rushkoff: Google Declares War on Facebook Of course, the information-wants-to-be-free troops are already up in arms. Some welcome what they see as the extinction of both evil empires in an ill-conceived death grip that will push Fox News and the Wall Street Journal off the mainstream map. Others see it as a last-gasp effort by "old media" to resist the unstoppable, Google-driven evolution of an entirely free content universe. They see searchability by Google as equivalent to participation in democratic society—and any resistance to offering up one's content to exploitation by Google Inc. as resistance to the natural openness of interactive media and bottom-up civilization.
As an early cyberpunk, I see their point—as well as the confused logic informing it. Greedy monopolists controlled media for a long time, and formed huge conglomerates with interests beyond providing people with the content they needed. Media companies moved into the business of delivering eyeballs to sponsors, instead of content to readers. Recording companies bilked the artists who created the music. Taking content for free seems justified when it is being taken from big bad companies. And making content ourselves, as well as distributing it freely to one another, is now correctly understood as a basic human right.
But we can't confuse our actual right to make and distribute content freely with Google’s perceived right to freely exploit the content everyone makes. Google is not in this for the fun of it; they make money off their searches. By making our content available to Google, we make Google's searches more valuable. If we don't feel our content is being made more valuable in the exchange, then we don't have to accept this searchability as some precondition of Internet citizenship.
However much we all might like free content in the short term, it is unsustainable in the long term. When nobody is paying for content, that content stops being created. If money can’t be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can't do it anymore. Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the New York Times and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content.
Advertising is certainly one option. But when Google becomes the meta-frame around all the content in everyone else's publications, then Google's ads are the only ones that really matter. Google's ads are the ones that show up when we are searching for content, and open to suggestion. That's the Internet equivalent of the moment we are flipping through the magazine—not the time we are spending when we deep inside an article and oblivious to the extraneous information beckoning from beyond its borders. Once we have clicked on the article and are brought to the interior of the publication on offer, we go into content mode—reading, rather than searching for relevant information, including ads.
Since the search engine is now extracting the ad revenue that used to go to the content provider, it makes sense that the search engine should pay some of that forward.
View as Single Page 12 Back to Top November 23, 2009 | 10:59pm Facebook | Twitter | Digg | | Emails | print Murdoch, Microsoft, Google, Business, Media, Bing Wall Street Journal, Bing Google, News Corp Microsoft, Content Business, Douglas Rushkoff, Bing, Paid Content, Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft, Fox (–) Show Replies Collapse Replies Sort Up Sort Down sort by date: matt59
News media is the greatest check on the power of politicians to abuse their position. The death of content would be a crime against humanity and would seriously undermine the survivability of democracy. All the independent newspapers of the world are under financial threat, and those that aren't have slashed staff and thereby undermined journalistic standards. I am myself guilty of getting my news for free on-line, and I cannot see how I or anyone else can expect to continue to do this without the standard of that news declining. We get what we pay for.
The "content" has been dead for years. How many Americans get their "news" from three large companies that long ago bought the now mostly AP whore "newspapers"? I buy a paper every morning, and I NEVER get what I pay for.
First, we're not currently getting our news for "free" any more than we get it for "free" when we watch CNN or MSNBC. We're dealing with advertising. The advertising model for online news may be slightly off-kilter right now, but advertising is like water. It will find its level. Second, the big news about the Bing/News Corp alliance is not that two corporations are teaming up to establish a new marketing model. The big news is the death of Bing. Once Bing becomes the engine through which you can get nothing but filtered right-wing corporate propanganda, it will cease to be used by anyone except those seeking right-wing propaganda. Does Bing really want to be the Fox News of the Internet? Fox News thrives in America, but the U.S. is a small part of the Googleverse. If they want to compete, they need to stay above the political fray. News Corp doesn't know how to do that.
So your interpretation of the deal is that Microsoft is exclusive to Murdoch and NewsCorp? That's not how I understood the exclusivity, and I'm sorry if I made it sound that way. The exclusivity would be what Microsoft is paying for. Murdoch's properties become exclusive to the Bing search engine. And Microsoft would have other partners, also selling search rights for exclusive use on the Bing engine. But Microsoft will still list everyone's else's content. It's not a matter of Microsoft pulling content providers who don't pay. It's a matter of Microsoft only paying content providers who give them an exclusive. Microsoft pays. Not Murdoch. So Microsoft isn't in danger of becoming an engine through which you can only get Murdoch content - unless Google starts the same deal, and gets left-wing media to sign on exclusively with it. That would be and interesting development.
I believe the very shift of News Corp properties - with all their attendant political and pro-business baggage - over to an exclusive search engine mathematically shifts your likely search results toward a political ideology. That creates a situation in which searchers have two choices: Go to Google where you'll have a better chance of finding neutral information, or choose Bing, where you know going in that your chances of receiving ideologically-driven results are mathematically higher. That's going to be a self-selecting and reinforcing phenomenon. Google should include that message in their marketing. And Microsoft, whether they intend to or not, will be perceived as weighing results toward their "partner." No good can accrue to Bing over this. And, if I were a writer for News Corp, I'd lose my mind over it. News Corp is effectively boxing in their visibility and impact. Their information footprint will have been reduced by a potentially career-crippling margin. Fun.
Work shouldn't be free, but there must be more innovative ways of funding content than subscription models. Subscription is a tricky issue online because it limits your exposure of content to new readers. WSJ's logic is totally flawed because they're ignoring the user perspective. If I as a user am on a search engine I'm generally not looking for the news source I'm looking for a subject, and I generally expect more than one result for that subject. I may judge the subject by the news source which may affect wether I click on the subjects link but if a specific news source isn't there I'm going to click on the next best link. WSJ is assuming that their brand is more important than the subject matter Lets say though that WSJ moves to Bing and takes it's few million visitors with it in a best case scenario, what does that really do to Google? Yeah it's a nice marketing campaign for Bing, but beyond that? I also don't think the assumption that they will adopt the paid model for other exclusive news content will save the industry. Smaller more desperate news agencies will simply fill in the gap left behind.
Murdoch: using Notepad create a file called ROBOT.TXT and place the following in it: User-agent: * Disallow: / Place copies in all your servers and no one will ever bother you again. No need for Microsoft. Google will honour these instructions. You are less honourable.
How assinine, Murdock calls himslf a fighter for freedom of the internet, Then wants paid for his content ? Deport that unamerican immigrant
Should'nt that read "Deport that unamerican immigrant bastard"?
If you've worked with Google and had the chance to listen to them behind closed doors you'd be hard pressed to see a difference between their desire to win at all costs vs. say Microsoft or Murdoch News Corp. The original founders don't act interested in administrating a huge company. So there are fiefdoms run by individuals, some who see the opportunity to use large wads of cash and a powerful brand to accomplish their means unchecked. I'm curious to see if we'll see a coup d'tat at Google as often happens with distracted founders or if it's more effective to allow the facade to exist that the founder's presence provides. It's not good. They also have knowledge of the psyches of each of us that would make our mothers envious. We need a clash of the Titans. Including better government regulations that limit the power of their use of our information.
I think the problem probably lies in spam. People do not trust advertisers that are advertising, even though they could pay for the content, like advertisers pay for content in newspapers. People don't trust new advertisers or pop ups, assuming they are just spammers or worse. Microsoft could come up with something to make it safe again to trust pop ups, but it seems there is more to this than just money. I think they are trying to dumb people down, by making information too expensive for an ordinary person to get, in this economic crash, where the value of capital was possibly being destroyed for much longer, than the "news" agencies let on.
A powerful analysis. I was thinking Microsoft Murdoch = hubris. True, of course. But maybe you're right. As all these companies know, you can dominate parts of ad-based media by growing huge. Google seems to have found the taproot of the ad tree. Maybe the next big thing is watching the bigs chop each other up. A new kind of top-down antitrust movement. Intriguing.
I think Murdoch misses one big point in marketing. Pride. So many products know, a person buys a product to look good, partly. I believe Murdoch owns both Economist and News of the World, but who would feel good sitting on a crowded subway, reading a publication that looks very much like soft porn to some people. Some things work better on the internet and some things work better in print. I also wonder if this could lead to another anti-trust complaint or claims of price fixing or that kind of thing.
If this deal happens, I. for one, will completely forget about Bing and probably Yahoo too, since Yahoo and Bing have made their recent agreement. If I want to read a tabloid, I'll go directly to the tabloid website.
It is a bit ironic that this article should be on The Daily Beast, a news aggregator which is itself in the business of taking eyeballs, and thus ad revenue, away from the content creators...
Why does the Daily Beast show the photo of Bill Gates on behalf of Microsoft. He doesn't represent the company any more.
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