News Corp, Microsoft in talks
- Source: Global Times
- [03:59 November 24 2009]
- Comments
Microsoft has held talks with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp over a possible plan for the software giant to pay the media company to remove its news websites from Google, a report said Monday.
The plan sets the scene for a battle between search engines for access to websites, and puts pressure on search juggernaut Google to start paying for content, the Financial Times said.
According to the newspaper, Microsoft is talking to other publishers to get them to remove themselves from Google too.
"This is all about Microsoft hurting Google's margin," an unnamed source was quoted as saying.
This could suggest that Microsoft is prepared to pay people to provide content for Bing. This would, hopefully, build Bing's market share and hit Google's revenues too, although the search engine has long claimed its news site brings in very little revenue, the news website Register reported.
However the biggest beneficiary of the tussle could be the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct a reliable online business model to replace declining newspaper circulation and print advertising revenues.
Murdoch has prompted a fierce debate among media watchers with his accusation that Google is "stealing" from his vast newspaper empire and his threat to block the search engine from accessing its content.
Murdoch has already announced plans to make readers pay to read his newspapers online. Google has said in response that news organizations were free to opt out of being indexed by the search engine.
Microsoft is attempting to chip away at Google's dominance in Web search with its new Internet search engine Bing.
But apparently even Google couldn't afford to strike deals with all the news companies of the world, according to the Washington Post.
Says Murdoch, of Google, "If they were to pay everybody for everything they took from every newspaper in the world, and every magazine, they wouldn't have any profits left."
Another public grudge between the two IT giants might be the newly released web-based Google Chrome, which is widely regarded as a challenger of the super-dominant position of Microsoft in the operating system market.
AFP/Global Times
