Murdoch enlists Microsoft in fight against Google and free content

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Murdoch enlists Microsoft in fight against Google and free content

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 24 November, 2009

Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp may seem to have little in common, but they do have a shared interest - arresting the flow of the software and content industries towards a free model. Now they have joined forces against the champion of free, ad-supported access, Google, with the giant publisher planning to remove its products from Google's search indexes and make its content available exclusively on Microsoft's rival search engine, Bing, reportedly in return for hefty fees.

This would promote Murdoch's view that newspaper and magazine content must be paid-for rather than giving into the free web - even if much of the revenue, in this case, would come from the search engine provider rather than the end users.

On the Microsoft side, such a deal would boost the slow progress of the new Bing system across all platforms, and might be particularly valuable in the mobile world, where the search market is still very much up for grabs. Although the embedding of Google search into Android, and its improving location aware capabilities, are increasing its chances, Microsoft and Yahoo still have many valuable carrier homescreen deals, including the former's with Verizon (except on Android).

Murdoch's blow against Google, which he claimed in a recent interview was stealing content and not compensating publishers, would complement his plans for the burgeoning ereader sector. Some of his papers, including the Wall Street Journal and London Times, are already available under subscription on the Amazon Kindle and the large-screen Kindle DX, which is optimized for newspapers, and News Corp has been rumored to be developing its own large ereader too.

According to the London Financial Times, Microsoft has also approached other large online publishers to encourage them to remove their sites from Google's search engine and move to Bing, in return for fees. This could force Google to respond in kind, hitting its profits by making it pay for valuable content. The FT's story quoted an anonymous web publisher saying the new agreement was "all about Microsoft hurting Google's margins".

Murdoch recently told Sky News Australia that he was exploring ways to remove his company's stories from Google sites, including Google News. "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it - steal our stories, we say they steal our stories - they just take them," he said. ""That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people…They shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep." It seems Microsoft is prepared to compromise, but it remains to be seen how Google will react. The search giant currently indexes the headline and first few sentences of news that is behind a subscription barrier, but Murdoch believes even this violates the 'fair use' doctrine and has hinted at possible legal action.