Murdoch in war over ‘theft’ of content
MEDIA tycoon Rupert Murdoch threw down the gauntlet to Google yesterday, declaring that News Corporation-owned websites such as The Times and The Sun would soon block the search engine.
Murdoch accused Google and Microsoft of “stealing” content from his newspapers’ online portals and said he was planning to pull their pages from search engines’ indices.
His comments mark a growing chasm between News Corporation’s thinking and the approach taken by most other newspaper groups.
Murdoch is determined to introduce paywalls to his most popular sites and believes search engines, which have soaked up advertising cash as internet “middlemen”, are enemies of the news industry.
He told Sky News Australia: “We will remove our websites from Google’s search index but that’s when we start charging… The people who simply pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. They shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”
Murdoch also attacked the BBC, whom he accused of lifting content from the likes of The Times for its news service.