Murdoch’s Google Gambit

By Eric Etheridge
NYT

On Sunday, the day before the 20th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall, Rupert Murdoch appeared in an interview on Sky News in Australia, and promised to erect pay walls around all his company’s Web sites and then block Google from searching and linking to them.

This is not the first shot across the Internet’s bow that Murdoch has fired, and a few old hands are growing a bit tired of these warnings. “Sheesh,” writes John Battelle, “Just give Google summary text and headlines to index (like the W.S.J. does now).”

Then do your best to convert would be readers to your paid model. That’s it. What’s the big deal?

The rest is bluster.

Others are still hoping that Murdoch actually delivers the Final Showdown. This could be “the search/engine newspaper standstill we’ve all been waiting for,” writes Simon Owens at his site, Bloggasm. “There are many who think this would be suicide, but if it is it would be suicide in the name of answering the question we’ve always asked: Can a newspaper survive without Google?”

(More here.)