Local Newspapers Failing As Google Takes Over

Rupert Murdoch has many holdings and he doesn't want Google to have free access to crawl over his websites anymore. At least, that's what he said from Australia yesterday. Murdoch has threatened to block Google from all of his websites and erect pay walls so that anyone who wants the news from him will have to subscribe. It will be interesting to see if he will follow through and if he does, how it will affect his holdings. As it stands now, news is very accessible on the Internet and so far, no one has had to pay for it. Yes, you still must pay for a paper at your local news stand, but the cost is fairly low. It isn't clear what Murdoch's motives are, whether it is a power play or if he wants to keep people reading actual papers, but I'm not sure this will be the way to do it.

Google isn't too worried about whether they will be denied access to Murdoch's holdings or not. They say it is a fairly simple procedure to remove their ads from his websites and that they will honor his wishes. Probably, neither Google nor Rupert Murdoch will suffer too much if it comes to pass, both appear to be fairly comfortable. Unfortunately, the rest of us will be the ones that it will affect the most, for what we now take for granted will only be available for pay. While no one has committed to a course of action as of yet, Google may want to take a look at Bing, a relatively new search engine that would like to command a larger share of the advertising market.  If Bing makes a few changes and goes after deals with publishing companies and social networks, it could happen. It would be another alternative to site monetization.