Marco Bertozzi:11.09.09
What am I on about? News Corp is talking about a) charging for content and b) pulling it from Google. Many people have used the analogy of the little boy with his finger stuck in the dam to demonstrate that Murdoch can’t hold back the tide of open access of content. Actually if you read the story it makes the point that if you act quickly you can hold back a bigger disaster such as a dam breaking, everyone assumes the dam breaks..it doesnt.

Where does that leave Murduch? Has he acted quickly and everyone else will follow and before you know the tide of paid for content will be stopped, or is he just a little bit too late? That is now what everyone is waiting to find out but I do think that perhaps he should have stuck his finger in the dam about 8-10 years ago. The world has evolved and people are able to aggregate so much content that paying for it seems strange, albeit very fair.

People are also a little more fickle than in the past, often when searching for news online, its to fulfil an immediate thirst for information, I would be intrigued to see how many people when searching for news care whether they get it from Sky news, Telegraph, BBC or The Guardian. Take 911, the largest event in news for a lifetime, people immediately started to search for information, does Murdoch really not want to be found in those circumstances? I think the key take out for me is that in an age of open access and such volumes of available content available this decision seems to be moving against the tide.