The Great Anti-Google Conspiracy

Such is the state of the media industry that any hope of remuneration, no matter how remote, is greeted with giddy breathlessness. And so we have word over the weekend that Microsoft (MSFT) execs have been secretly conspiring with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (NWSA) to "de-index" Google (GOOG) from its Web pages, effectively depriving Google users from accessing news stores published by Fox et al, but allowing Bing users to keep reading the stories of the day via Microsoft.

The story first broke in the Financial Times, and it's as follows: Microsoft has been quietly approaching a variety of news outlets, offering cash to get them to block Google's search bots from scanning their pages and indexing important stories as part of its Google News function. Google, of course, has been notoriously coy about the subject of paying for the opportunity to do so, arguing that truly interesting stories will compel readers not just to scan the headline but to click to the story and possibly whatever advertising may accompany it. Now, it appears that News Corp. has bitten on the deal and will partner with Microsoft to offer them a more or less exclusive relationship; if you want stories from Fox News or any or Murdoch's media properties, Bing will be where you go to find them.

This has sent reporters into a tizzy, offering them a hope, however slim, that the free and universal access to information offered by the Internet won't necessarily destroy every job in the industry. "The biggest beneficiary of the tussle could be the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct a reliable online business model that adequately replaces declining print and advertising revenues," writes the FT team that broke the story.

And as Chadwick Matlin has written in these very pages, Murdoch's aggressiveness in charging people for content via Hulu could ultimately offer a lifeline for a media industry flabbergasted by a world in which readers and viewers get creative content for free. But will it work?

Wired writer Eliot Van Buskirk is at least a little skeptical. "In the short term, this could be disastrous to News Corp’s publications." he writes. "Google doesn’t need the news—or, to be more precise, it doesn’t need any specific news source. If bloggers have taught the world anything, it’s that one journalist’s facts can become the basis of another journalist’s story." In other words, information will leak out, no matter how strenuously you try to monopolize it. In addition, Googlewatcher Jeff Jarvis cites a study that tracks the number of eyeballs following a group of German publishers that have tried to assemble a similar Google-blocking coalition and notes that Wikipedia—which would almost immediately incorporate important news regarding any subject the German press would care to report—enjoys three times the appearances on the first page of Google search results as any of the German publishers do, for any given subject. So block Google News all you want, Jarvis claims, and users will just pop over to Wikipedia if they want the latest dirt on Britney or whomever. Imagining that even Murdoch can stop this phenomenon, he concludes, is "a swine flu of stupidity."

Derek Thompson over at the Atlantic begs to differ. It's not access to information that matters, he argues—it's the money. All the Web traffic in the world has done diddly-squat to boost revenues, and without that, you can't stay in business. So even if readers can go around Google to eventually find the latest news on whatever they're interested in, Murdoch's deal could still keep the journos in drinking money. "[Jarvis is] not engaging with the central problem, which is that today's online ad rates can't save journalism," Thompson writes. "So why blame Murdoch for looking for something that can?"