News Corp. Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch (pictured left) set the Internet abuzz Monday after an interview appeared online in which he said the company is considering blocking Google from being able to search its Web sites. During the wide-ranging Sky News Australia interview (he and interviewer David Speers veered from the free-versus-paid debate to President Barack Obama's job performance), Mr. Murdoch said that consumers shouldn't have had free access to information online that they paid for in other formats. - WSJ
Dominant Social Theme: It's not fair?
Free-Market Analysis: We wondered in a previous issue of the Bell just what Rupert Murdoch - easily the most brilliant of the current crop of media moguls - would do to combat the corrosive effect of the Internet. An electronic medium of powerful proportions, it is eating into the profits of mainstream media like a tapeworm, hollowing out the core and leaving only a rotten shell. Now we think we discern the limning of an outline, a faint specter of what Rupert Murdoch is designing for the future of his staggering publications. The jab at Google is the giveaway. To put it bluntly, what it means is that Rupert Murdoch hasn't got a clue.
He's got nothing. He's whiffed.
We say this with caution, because one can never count Murdoch out. (And surely Murdoch's plans are not all negative - he will build as well as ban.) But when one starts to speak of bans and of taking exclusionary measures that run counter to the day's driving technology, then one is likely going down the path of those who suggested, during the heyday of the Gutenberg press, that licenses be necessary before anyone could print a book. It was a suggestion that never caught on because it was impractical. It probably is impractical for Murdoch to bar Google as well.
But there is more to Murdoch's thought regarding how he may position his media empire in the face of the Internet's challenge. It is from our point of view a far more incredible suggestion, and one that confirms our point of view that Murdoch is at the top of his game a media dealmaker. He loves collecting and amassing media, especially newspapers, which is where he started, but he is ultimately, apparently, of an authoritarian caste and may be willing to sacrifice the very communication he seeks to save in order to salvage his enterprises. What would impel us to write such a thing? Here is another excerpt from the above article:
Mr. Murdoch added that News Corp. believes that the fair-use doctrine, which allows for use of copyrighted materials in limited ways such as search results, "could be challenged in the courts and barred altogether."
This throw-away sentence toward the bottom of the article is actually of profound significance. If one accepts that Murdoch and his empire are an integral part of the monetary elite's control of mainstream media, than it becomes clear that one of the most powerful media people in all the world, perhaps THE most powerful media titan, is seriously considering severing the foundational cord of Western science and literacy to preserve his power base and his sponsors'.
Fair use is at the heart of the tradition of Western science and rational thought. If one cannot quote (or even reference) the thought and findings of others, then the conversation of literature and science virtually dies. All scientific research is referential, as is all academic study. What Murdoch is suggesting is a nightmare scenario where the courts will be empowered to decide, absent fair use, what constitutes a legal summary of a document, what constitutes appropriate vocabulary for that summary, etc. None of it makes sense in our humble opinion, and the result would be a legal mess that would take decades if not centuries for the West's tradition of scientific and academic thought to recover from.
We've pointed out that the mainstream media is in a terrible jam because its owners cannot tolerate the kind of truth-telling that takes place every day on the Internet. Thus, mainstream media is bleeding readers. Maybe Murdoch would like to ban the Internet, but it's not possible. So instead, he is contemplating banning its leading news aggregator (a move which would likely hurt his own publications a great deal more than Google). He is also contemplating a legal challenge to fair use, which is the foundational communications methodology of the Western world, and one upon which the scientific method (and all academic and even popular communication) is erected.
Conclusion: As we pointed out the other day, it is most interesting to watch Murdoch's public writhing. He is incapable of keeping quiet because he obviously cares a great deal about what he's put together and he sees quite intimately what is about to happen to him and his vast media holdings. But we are sorry, Mr. Murdoch! You seem to be coming down on the side of banning rather than building. This is never a good strategy. Holding back the flood tide with a finger in the dike merely prolongs the inevitable. But go ahead and do it. Electronic publications such as the Daily Bell will profit inordinately. People read news and information to find out what's going on. If they can't find it in Murdoch's publications, they will look elsewhere. We eagerly await the challenge of so many questing, new eyes.
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