Featured Blog: Rupert Murdoch vs. Google: Who will win?

Lauren Orsini

According to Rupert Murdoch, Google is a thief.

“The people who simply pick up everything to run with, and steal our stories…they just take them..without payment. That’s Google, Microsoft, Ask.com..a whole lot of people," he said in a recent interview to Sky News Australia.

Murdoch's solution? He's removing Newscorp from Google. Completely.

The media mogul said he would rather have fewer visitors to his website, as long as the people who did show up each paid their due. That's why Murdoch plans to also set up paywalls around Newscorp sites as a second layer of insulation.

Here's the vow from Murdoch himself, as taken from Sky News' YouTube channel. The interview is 30 minutes long, but to get the section I'm talking about, just go to the 2 minute mark:

So will it work? Can Murdoch reject Google, charge for his websites and succeed in making his website profitable?

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow is skeptical: "...good luck with that, Rupert. Have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet, hoping that the world's politics and economies will reform themselves to suit your fevered imaginings."

Meanwhile, The Inquistr's Duncan Riley labels Murdoch's plan an "epic win" that might become the model to make Web sites profitable. Let's hope Murdoch goes ahead with this. We'll soon see if the model works.