Re: Murdoch's Folly: Block Google & Kill Fair Use -- Plus a Nasty Truth

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart () pobox com>
Date: November 10, 2009 12:06:38 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: RE: [IP] Murdoch's Folly: Block Google & Kill Fair Use -- Plus a Nasty Truth

Most of these discussions have either been
- reinventing the Deep Linking discussion, or
- reinventing Xanadu
or in general restarting previous discussions from years past.

Deep linking is the most directly applicable discussion here.
If Murdoch doesn't want Google/Yahoo/etc. to link to his articles,
he could set robots.txt to ask their robots nicely not to do so,
and Google/Yahoo/etc. would comply (unlike a few spammer crawlers.)
But he doesn't want that - he wants people to feel like happy Newscorp customers
who come in through Newscorps front pages (well, good luck with that!)

But there's an http mechanism for checking how you got to a given page,
which is REFERER (or various Stupid Cookie Tricks)
so he could set his web servers to let Google index
everything or some subset of everything,
and when regular humans use the links, he could present them whatever he wants,
whether it's the original page with ads,
or a nicely framed "Welcome to NewsCorp - Here's the story you wanted and
the rest of Today's Exciting Content!"
or a "Here's the first paragraph, pay me if you want the rest",
or anything in between.

Mark Cuban's assertion that people are finding the content via Twitter is
interesting, but amenable to the same solutions,
plus Murdoch could provide easy mechanisms for people to get short links
instead of using bit.ly or the older URL-shorteners,
so they see wsj.com/123xyz instead and Murdoch gets to retain connectivity.

Nickel a page?  Somehow the cellphone companies have been able to get
a dime per SMS message for years, though any heavy user buys flat rate.
As a stockholder, I consider this to be artificially high and therefore
likely to disappear after a while, but I'll cash the checks now, thanks.
In just about any other contect, the Internet will route around it.

                Thanks; Bill Stewart






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