Murdoch and Microsoft Talk About Ganging Up on Google

News Corp. (NWS) and Microsoft (MSFT) are reportedly in early-stage talks to form a partnership whereby Microsoft would supposedly pay News Corp. to “de-index” its news content from Google (GOOG).

This, then, is the next salvo in Rupert Murdoch’s private war against Google, and it comes in the form of an apparent trial balloon this weekend leaked to reporters at the Financial Times, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal.

The newspapers report that News Corp. initiated the discussions with Microsoft, but that the software giant has held similar conversations with other news organizations about withholding their news content from Google as well.

This comes about a week after Murdoch and several of his execs launched loud public attacks on the search giant, which routinely indexes its newspaper sites, and publishes headlines and snippets of individual articles on Google News (GN).

Both the search and GN pages are an important source of traffic to all newspaper sites, including those at News Corp. But, clearly wanting to better monetize his content, Murdoch is on a campaign to try and figure out how to get search engines like Google’s and Microsoft’s Bing to pay for what they now search for free.

The trouble is that the courts have held that what search engines do with news content is covered under the “Fair Use” doctrine, so they don’t have to pay for it.

Not only that, by using a simple bit of code, any publisher can easily block Google from crawling its sites at any time.

Given these truths, the only reason Microsoft would pay a publisher to do so would be to try and gain some market share from Google, which maintains a two-thirds market share in search. The Seattle-based software company, by contrast, has less than ten percent.

For Murdoch’s part, I think this is nothing more than another attempt by the media czar to try and get Google’s attention. What he apparently does not understand, however, is that news in all forms only accounts for a small amount of the overall content indexed by search engines.

So if he wants to block Google’s access, the Mountainview-based search giant would probably just shrug and wave him good-bye.

Recent Bnet Posts on Murdoch:

News Corp. Execs Shocked At WSJ’s Leaky Backdoor
“Although it’s hard to believe, it appears that top News Corp. (NWS) execs have only recently begun to realize that the paywall they maintain around much of the Wall Street Journal’s content leaks…”

Legal Experts on How Murdoch’s Threats May Impact “Fair Use” Doctrine
“Media industry titan Rupert Murdoch’s explicit threats this week to block Google from searching his content sites, and to sue the BBC for its use of content he says is “stolen” from his sites got me to wondering whether the head of News Corp. has, in fact, any basis in the law for launching these calculated attacks at this time and in this manner…”

Now it’s Murdoch vs. the World as He Threatens to Sue the BBC
“Media mogul Rupert Murdoch continues to amuse even as he perplexes those of us hoping to divine where he is headed with his current round of threats…”

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…”