By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

Rupert Murdoch raised quite a stir in the publishing world when he announced last month that he would, in the near future, remove his company’s news content from Google. His reasoning: Google is stealing, making money off headlines, decks and images, which ultimately hurts his bottom line since people aren’t viewing that content on his company’s sites.

In December, the news industry fired another salvo when Murdoch’s News Corp. and four other media conglomerates announced the formation of a joint venture to develop a digital publishing platform for the Web and the emerging e-Reader market. This followed the Hearst Corp., one of the companies involved in Murdoch’s conglomerate, attempting to push its Skiff e-Reader software to e-Reader devices in 2010.

That Google — and the rest of the technology world — didn’t blink any of these ideas is telling. Google, in fact, quickly unveiled an easy solution that would allow any publisher to remove its content immediately from search. So far, none have. [Read more...]