Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
At a conference of World Media Executives at Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Rupert Murdoch has taken aim at search engines like Google as internet parasites.According to the News Corporation Chairman, the so-called "aggregators" on the internet steal content from traditional media organisations and, he says, the time has come for them to pay for it.
[abc.net.au...]
I wonder if Murdoch is playing around with Google shares this week... Does anyone think this argument has any legs?
[edited by: tedster at 2:14 am (utc) on Oct. 10, 2009]
[edit reason] add attribution for the quote [/edit]
THIS GUY leaves no doubts.
He's the allegorical "human farmers" that the animals of "Google Farm" work so hard to overthrow...
and then become.
And YES!, what he says is ALSO "true",
and behind it, is the worst kind of intentions.
Any script writers out there? Free idea! Modern-day Animal Farm done using the internet start-ups as the pigs and the Humans farmers as the corporate conglomerate media that Murdoch's ilk represent...
Working Title = "Internet Farm - A Cautionary Satire"
To be totally straight, Murdoch didn't single out Google -- the reporter just spun the story in that direction. Murdoch took aim at all Internet aggregators. Animal Farm indeed - good analogy, whitenight.
The rise and fall of Empires. It's an endless cycle.
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It may take quite a while to sort out intellectual property law in the light of new technologies. That disruption started with cassette tapes. There were some visionaries who got it right away - like the Grateful Dead - but decades later, we still had the Napster episode.
In this current struggle between the older print/broadcast mindset and the new online vehicles, there is certainly an intellectual property concern to sort out. Economic balance cannot include having one business model be a parasite.
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sites like google news can't just step in and replace them, because they do no reporting of their own.
It's hard to comment on a story where I see no good guy. I see Murdoch as a dark force, and yet I also agree with what he is saying. I begin to worry about my own balance when I'm nodding along to Rupert's Tune, no matter how agreeable his melody.
tedster, it sounds as if your thoughts about Google are evolving beyond the "symbiosis" you have described in historical posts - actually using the word parasitic in this thread.
I am not being provocative. I would like to hear more of your thoughts on this though. You choice of words suggests you are troubled on a much deeper level.
what about when the papers start going to the wall
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Boo hoo Mr. Murdoch.
You choice of words suggests you are troubled on a much deeper level.
I am. I still feel that Google's conscious intentions are benign. But as they grow, there is also an unconscious, shadow side that also grows and it becomes very important to illuminate.
Even in-your-face comments such as Murdoch's, can have the effect of REQUIRING Google to notice their own dark side - the place where their idealistically intended symbiosis begins to kill off those on whom they also depend.
If there is a major flaw in Google, it is their dynamic combination of idealism and business savvy. Carl Jung once wrote that the beginning of wisdom is the acceptance of evil as a personal trait - the observation that "I" am, necessarily, both evil and good.
Evil exists in every entity. A slogan cannot undo that universal fact - it's just youthful idealism, wishful thinking. Better to mature -- to notice that, in reality, you ARE evil and you cannot be other than a mix of good and evil. With that maturity comes a better chance that you will not DO evil, that you will accept responsibility for your inescapable dark side and transcend it in your actions.
I recommend this to everyone - all sides of the equation - because we all have this two-sided make up. There is no practical use for a self-righteous stance or the assumption that "I have the moral high ground and you don't."
The best we as webmasters and business owners can aim for (no matter how great or small our presence) is a symbiotic relationship with the Googles of our world. The game is competitive-cooperative, and not either one exclusively.
it's not the internet that is the problem. it's the companies that abuse it. google has the perfect money-making wheeze: take someone else's expensive hard work, mix it up with a load of other people's expensive hard work and paste the page with ads.
Google didn't invent search or the caching of content - but they did find a viable business model using it. Would have been better if we all had noticed the problem in the early 90s, but we didn't.
We mostly love search traffic, and we monetize our businesses around it. Is that enough balance to surrender part of our IP rights? Clearly the old media don't think so. But it is odd how the average webmaster complained very little when it was Napster ripping off the recording studios. Now, it's our turn to feel ripped off.
All of society has the nasty job of retrofitting some fairness into the situation, because we didn't insist on building it in from the start. We won't get that job done by painting Google all black, nor can they contribute to the job if the only color paint they use is white.
A slogan cannot undo that universal fact - it's just youthful idealism, wishful thinking.
I have to wonder if the youthful idealism hasn't become cloaked by distance and the greed (for lack of a better word) of corporate America - laissez faire capitalism at its best/worst.
The "kids" don't run the show anymore. The exciting, different, innovative and idealistic company is becoming just another corporate behemoth, and the institution justifies itself on its own success rather than any meaningful exterior standards.
No longer are decisions made to a standard of "Is it right to...?", but rather, "How much will it make?", or worse, "Can we get away with it?"
Examples, besides this thread, might include, "Is it right to cut off long term adwords customers without warning, explanation or support?" Or, "Is it right to deny web telephony to regions that actually cost us money?" Or, "Is it right to convert Explorer to Chrome, in spite of how it might break built in features?" Etc. etc.
We don't even need to get into the ongoing privacy issues. My point is that there is a certain momentum that has built up that seems to be pushing Google onto, in my opinion, well worn, if unstable ground traversed by many large companies over the years. Witness the shift in sympathies to MS over the past year. I don't think it is simply because Google is the big boy on the block. No, it has more to do with attitude.
google seems to think that because they send us traffic, that somehow makes up for the fact that they are taking our stuff, using it, and making money. they think it's a fair swap. well maybe it is for the 20 sites that appear on the first two pages of google search, but what about the other 10,000? they get nothing. and maybe it is for the five papers that appear on the front page of a google news story, but what about the other 10,000? they get nothing, zip.
if someone makes money off my stuff, then i want a share of the money. that is all that rupert murdoch is saying. that is not an unfair position. people can't label him a dinosaur just because he doesn't kneel down in front of the google steamroller.
people can't label him a dinosaur just because he doesn't kneel down in front of the google steamroller.
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if someone makes money off my stuff, then i want a share of the money. that is all that rupert murdoch is saying. that is not an unfair position. people can't label him a dinosaur just because he doesn't kneel down in front of the google steamroller.
Then it will take some people to take the fall. Sites that fight Google will be removed from Google's search results. Sucks that companies have control of what should be impartial searches but that's life.
even if he developed the next generation of digital readers with all the bells and whistles, like you say, that doesn't fix the problem. because aggregators will still be there taking his stuff.
even if he developed the next generation of digital readers with all the bells and whistles, like you say, that doesn't fix the problem. because aggregators will still be there taking his stuff.
Murdoch is first and foremost a businessman, as he has proven innumerable times. I say to him -- open your eyes -- your "news content" profits can skyrocket.
Imagine this: A fellow living in Kansas City stops at his local grocery store to do some shopping. He pulls his news reader memory card from his shirt pocket and plugs it into a kiosk by the front entrance, uses the touch screen menu to order the NY Times and Wall Street Journal; puts in 8 quarters and 45 seconds later they are on his card. He gets his groceries, goes home and reads the 2 "digital papers" in his easy chair. Now multiply that by a million people or more around the country every day. No papers to print; no trucks to carry them to Kansas City; no kids throwing them in your bushes. There's money to be made, and believe me, Murdoch will make it -- it's just a matter of society catching up with the potential. When that happens and the standards are set as to how much the "aggregators" can legitimately use, he'll be singing a different tune.
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As tedster says, intellectual property deserves protection.
Until they make the rules equal for whatever country you are hosted in, this will never happen.
...He gets his groceries, goes home and reads the 2 "digital papers" in his easy chair....
That model might still be workable for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but for most papers, that model has changed.
With the web, the unit is no longer the latest edition of "the paper"... the unit is the article, and the most common method of retrieval is likely to be search, with social media and blog links perhaps also being high on the list. Once a link to an article has attracted you and you're on the newspaper site, you may well choose to browse around.
Both of the papers cited above, the WSG and the NYT, have gone with walled content in the past, and the WSG still has some... but the NYT, which is a well-SEOed site, dropped its subscription model just about two years ago because at the time the potential advertising revenue was looking better than the potential subscription revenue. And for all of Murdoch's complaints, the WSJ articles I see have "Share:" links to Facebook and to all of the other expected social media sites.
Also, Google announced a month ago that it had partnered with "three dozen top publishers", the NYT among them, to develop an experimental news browsing tool and a revenue sharing model.
New in Google Labs - Read news fast with Google Fast Flip
[webmasterworld.com...]
So, who was Murdoch talking to? To his web staff, to drop those Facebook links? To the Chinese, who were hosting the conference? To Google, who probably had invited him to join in the Fast Flip experiment (and I'm only guessing that one of his properties isn't in there)? To his IT staff, who could easily block Googlebot?
I don't want to diminish the problems of content aggregation and of news organization survival. Both are considerable, as is the problem of protecting intellectual property rights... and dealing with what these rights are... in a digital world. I just don't think that Murdoch was seriously addressing any of these. He is, though, probably haggling about the price.
Ultimately, I'm anticipating some form of micropayments. See recent discussion here...
Google Checkout micropayments extension to help with Paid News Content
[webmasterworld.com...]
Buy flight ticket, hotel bills, translator costs, flak Jacket if somewhere dangerous, ,,,,
End result , a 2000 word article
Better to mature -- to notice that, in reality, you ARE evil and you cannot be other than a mix of good and evil. With that maturity comes a better chance that you will not DO evil, that you will accept responsibility for your inescapable dark side and transcend it in your actions.
Lol, Tedster drops one of the keys to the Universe and no one has a comment?!
Oh well, It's called "shadow" for a reason
perhaps, deep meditation on my handle would help. Yes, it's a multi-layered meaning and it's NOT a mispelling
Until they make the rules equal for whatever country you are hosted in, this will never happen.
Been thinking a while about this.
It seems the world is going to have to unify in some sense
and create a "Internet Constitution"
that protects the rights of the common man, the middleman, and the PTB.
And naturally some of the current "Powers That Be" and Middlemen are going to be unhappy with their cut,
but the "means of production" don't come FROM them, do they?
but for most papers, that model has changed.
One thing is for sure -- the technology IS going to change, and if history is a model, that means faster and cheaper. So it's up to the newspapers to adapt if they intend to survive -- it's all going to happen whether they like it or not.
It's possible that the aggregators are simply what's happening now at this stage of development. In 3 years they may seem more like bite-sized morsels, served up to entice viewers to buy the full meal. If that's the way it goes, few people will find fault.
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And picking up on the "means of production" reference to Marxist theory, could I suggest that in an ironic twist, Bourgeois Google, as controller of the Means of Distribution, is making unfair profit at the expense of the labouring Proletariat Murdoch? Or would such a sympathetic depiction of the arch-capitilist be too grotesque?
Aren't handles fun?
a spoonful of traffic = opium for the masses
