Rupert Murdoch, chief of News corp, wants the media industry to rally against google’s increasing power.
Rupert Murdoch threw down the gauntlet to Google Thursday, accusing the search giant of poaching content it doesn’t own and urging media outlets to fight back. “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, ” ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ “
Google ( GOOG - news - people ) sees it differently. They send more than 300 million clicks a month to newspaper Web sites, says a Google spokesperson. The search giant is in “full compliance” with copyright laws. “We show just enough information to make the user want to read a full story–the headlines, a line or two of text and links to the story’s Web site. That’s it.” For most links, if a reader wants to peruse an entire article, they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site.
Maybe so. But Murdoch’s anger is understandable. Like the music industry, newspapers have watched new distribution channels change the economics of their business. Sites like Google, which don’t produce any journalism of their own, have made themselves into destinations for readers by successfully organizing the work of others and selling advertising against it. Meanwhile, the authors whither. In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson drew a bead on Murdoch’s beef: “Google devalues everything it touches,” he said. “It divides content quantitatively rather than qualitatively.”
Yet the relationship is more complex than that. Sites like WSJ.com rely on Google to send them readers, working hard to game how they appear on Google through the dark arts of search engine optimization. Newspapers use Google in other ways too. Users streaming to The Los Angeles Times Web site last year followed the path of Southern California wildfires using Google maps at the site. The maps were displayed alongside links to updated stories about fires.
I think it is silly to blame the problems of the old media on google. Google is just the biggest beneficiary of the internet tidal wave’s disruption of media. Murdoch knows this very well. He correctly identifies the threat posed by google’s increasing power and the need to neutralize it. He is just trying to rally his industry brethern against this threat. The best way to do it is not by fighting google in courts and strong arming it in deal negotiations. They need to embrace innovative startups and make it easy for them to compete against companies like google and disrupt them. They need to create an innovation ecosystem around media that encourages startups to flourish and help the old media companies transition into the new digital, web and mobile world. This innovation can not come from inside of the old media companies because they are too worried about protecting their current revenue streams. Rupert Murdoch was one of the first media chiefs to realize this. A good example is his acquistion of myspace. Another one is the creation of hulu in partnership with NBS univrsal. That is the best way to neutralize google.