Murdoch Plays High-Stakes Game of Chicken with Google

Rupert Murdoch is probably the most outspoken media executive of them all in threatening to retaliate against Google for what he, and others, see as copyright violations by the search giant.

And, given the size and scope of his media empire, the News Corp. mogul is hard to ignore.

In the latest escalation of his verbal war against Google, Murdoch told a Sky News reporter that News Corp. will probably make its content unsearchable by Google when it launches its upcoming paid content strategy.

Doing so would be simple. All any website has to do is implement the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which prevents web spiders and other search robots from accessing its content.

But if he actually goes ahead with blocking Google from indexing his content, Murdoch would seem to be committing business suicide. The search engine drives more visitors to virtually all media sites than any other source, by far, so an immediate effect would be a massive traffic loss.

Plus, if he also is planning on making good with his promise to erect a more complete paywall around his content, Murdoch will be limiting those who can access his popular media properties, like the Wall Street Journal, even further.

Frankly, it is hard to understand why he is so publicly and adamantly pushing these initiatives unless they are, in fact, simply bargaining chips in an effort to coerce Google to share more than traffic with News Corp.

After all, there must be a method to his madness, no?

Mark Cuban speculates that Murdoch calculates that Google’s headline-and-excerpt model of sending traffic is becoming less important than it used to be, because social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have become a more effective (and more viral) sources of visitors, without the excerpt.

Along that line of reasoning, Murdoch may think Google is newly vulnerable to the prospect of media organizations like his blocking it from indexing their sites.

Meanwhile, over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow suggests that Murdoch could be planning to make a deal with a second-tier search engine. If so, there really there only is one of those big enough to play, and its called Bing.

Lots of speculation all around, therefore, suggesting that Murdoch may be the only one to know where this all is headed.

Related Bnet Post: The End of Free Content? Murdoch is Wrong.

(Thank you to Thierry Lamouline for alerting me to this story.)