callivert - 8:49 am on Apr 3, 2009 (gmt 0)

Mr Murdoch is free to block the search engines and to force anyone who wants to read what his company writes to pay. That would be a business decision.

That's exactly the decision he is talking about. Maybe you're right and it would be foolish for him to do so. Certainly, Google has positioned themselves as the "place to go" for information, including news information.

i find it amusing to suggest that completely removing News Corp from any search engine would somehow increase revenue or traffic

Maybe Newscorp needs Google, maybe not. They should run the experiment and find out. But that doesn't change the fact that Google is getting content for free, even though that content cost a lot of money to produce.