I've Had It With Google (the new 'Evil Empire' perhaps?)

In a rather chatty and gleefully positive and 'helpful' December 2009 blog post, Google announced that all the world's news gathering and publishing companies (read: all of the major papers, major broadcasting networks and wire services now publishing on their own web sites) needn't fret about their original articles and information being re-published on Google search result pages and iGoogle-based home pages because the 'ol Goog had figured out a way to make nice. Basically it boils down to this (at least in the Goog's thinking): give Google some stuff for free and charge visitors to the original news and information publishers' sites for access to other stuff. Here's the problem. Rupert Murdoch and several other media poo-bahs have only recently figured out that Google cheerfully re-publishes headlines and article excerpts (accompanied on each search result page by ads from which Google earns big money), and which collectively cost the aforementioned media magnates hundreds of millions of dollars (for paid reporters, agencies and sources, bureaus, etc.) to gather and publish in the first place in their own newspapers, web sites, magazines and television broadcasts. While the Goog helps you find all this stuff online, its search result pages loaded with ads at the same time help the Goog make money. To many people, this all makes perfectly good sense. The media magnates who spend big dough gathering news and information in the first place would much prefer to be collecting all (or at least a significant portion) of the revenue Google is squeezing out of the magnates' investments. Consumer groups (including the Electronic Frontier Foundation - the EFF) haven't quite figured this one out. Here's the rub. If it costs lots of money to gather and publish original information, and if the major news publishers who fork over big money to gather the news from around the world can't make a buck doing so, how long will it be before most of the information we see is nothing more than reprints of corporate and government press releases absent any challenge, any analysis and any opinion. After all, if there's no money to pay people to do that sort of work, why would anyone bother to do it? Google's logic has large holes in it. So I say let Google contribute to its own information storehouse by jumping into the same pond as the real media companies. It's all well and good for Google to avoid such a commitment by stating that it has never intended to engage in such work, but the reality is that Google profits directly from the investment of others in news gathering and media companies. It's a bit of a free ride which Murdoch and his compadres are getting ready to halt. We all used to pay for newspaper subscriptions which supported little more than the cost of delivering the paper. All other revenue came from advertisers. Now that Google has scooped large buckets of money out of advertising budgets formerly devoted to the news gathering and media companies, those companies are asking Google to either contribute news gathering of its own or get out of the water. Google can't have it both ways.