Google? Pirate?

So Barack Obama thinks SOPA is not worth the paper it is printed on, and Rupert Murdoch, @therealshitmydadsays, thinks Google is a pirate.

That's interesting thinking. Obviously Murdoch wants his newspapers to be online but behind paywalls and not accessible through search engines. If you are paying, you obviously know the name and the domain name. Show up and read. You found me when you paid for the subscription.

I don't know where to begin. I mean, a search engine is a good thing, right? Or am I missing something here? Do we want to go back to the good old days of the Yahoo directory?

Murdoch seems to think the internet was designed to save him the costs on paper. ("Why can't you just read the paper on your computer?") Everything else should remain the same.

Paywalls Make No Sense

Image via Wikipedia

TechCrunch: The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment: saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

Paywalls make no sense at all. The internet is a global medium. People anywhere should be able to come over to your site. Just like net neutrality is so basic to what the internet is all about, the idea of paywalls runs counter.