October 11th, 2009
Newsmakers: Be careful what you wish for
At the World Media Summit, Tom Curley and Rupert Murdoch took turns bashing Google over their klepto antics and ruthless news stealing behavior. They have been stealing their content for too long, and it’s about time they paid up.
The truth is, they can prevent Google from stealing from them any time they want — but they don’t. They simply whine and complain about how Google uses their content for Google News, and makes huge profit from it (though I haven’t been able to find a single advertisement on Google News anywhere).
Why would they complain? I am willing to bet Google has been their main source of traffic for a really long time. This is the classic “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” situation that has the potential to severely backfire.
Imagine this: Instead of Google waiting for News Corp and the AP to modify their robots.txt file to make Google ignore them, Google does it themselves. I think Google should call their bluff and remove them from the index completely. That would surely stop their complaining, right?
Garett Rogers 
is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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