News Corp Wants to Block Google From Indexing News

One of the biggest news organizations around is facing off with Google in a war to remove its content from the search engine’s index.

Rupert Murdoch, who owns News Corp and is behind the Sun, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and several other outlets, is accusing Google of stealing their content by listing it in their search engines. By the way, Murdoch is 78-years-old.

The news executive says that once his company sets up a subscription-based service to sell their content to paying customers, he will block Google from indexing their sites and remove them completely from the Google News index. What the hell?

He should know that Google is probably the single biggest source of traffic to any of his sites and it will only hurt them in the future if they decide to put a block on that.

The general idea is that good news content should be paid for. Since when? Newspapers are going out of business because people are turning to the web, and now they want to block that? That won’t stop anybody from reading news online, as most people will just surf over to another site like The Huffington Post for example.

We all know what outcome News Corp has had by trying to manage web properties… case in point: MySpace.com. The company purchased MySpace a few years ago and turned it into one big corporate advertisement. The social media website has gone downhill as their traffic slides into a black hole and users move over to Twitter and Facebook.

But News Corp isn’t the only company going after Google for indexing their content. The Associated Press wants to start charging Google for carrying their news. Charging Google?

What’s wrong with these companies today? We’re deep into the social media era where news, content and information is shared freely among others in a fast-paced and instant environment. Embrace it!

What’s next, attempting to block out Twitter users from tweeting what they’re watching on CNN?

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