This is pretty much where I come out on the Murdoch thing (of course,  I’ve been reading DW for about 7 years,  and so his thinking has probably a lot to do with how I think about the net,  and content. 

People say silly things like Google would be nothing without the NY Times, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that the Times let Google index their news stories. I know this because I had a Long Bet with Martin Nisenholtz that I won more or less by default. Times articles couldn’t show up in the ranks on Google because the Times wouldn’t let them! It was dumb not just cause it meant that Martin lost the bet, but it was dumb because they let Wikipedia become the authority on so many topics that the Times would have done a better job at, imho. And they were throwing away flow, and flow is money.

Who gets their news from Google? (Scripting News)

I don’t know why anyone would NOT want their content indexed by Google. Like DW says,  it’s flow.  Look at Amazon and the online book market (and just about everything else now in online products is somewhere ,  if not completely,  flowing through pieces of the system that is Amazon  —thus the imagery of the river/)  Amazon has mega flow.   Their ubiquity in the online sale market has certainly given them flow.  I just think Murdoch doesn’t get it.  And that’s what makes this a bit scary.  Is this going to result in some sort of “pipe control” war?  How badly will money of the clueless and controlling screw things up?