Microsoft and News Corp potential alliance, against the open Web

Microsoft and News Corp potential alliance, against the open Web

On several occasions over the last few months, News Corp chairman, Rupert Murdoch has been quoted hinting at changes he foresees for his high-profile Web properties. Most notably the Wall Street Journal and its network of sites, Murdoch believes in the paid subscription model for online properties and that aggregation sites like Google News are hurting not only newspapers, but online news sources like his own.

Now it appears that Microsoft is willing to play along, after the Financial Times revealed a potential pact between the two. As obnoxious as it sounds, the deal would center on having WSJ's sites delisted from Google's index, favoring Bing search results instead.

According to the report, Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers, essentially offering a way to monetize by exclusively choosing their search engine over its competitors. This could mean business to newspapers that have struggled so far in bringing the sufficient revenues online to compensate for the decline seen in their standard local newspaper subscriptions.

That said, as much as Microsoft is willing to invest on competing with Google, we see this kind of pact bringing more threat to the openness of the Web than anything else.

Looks like Microsoft is making a pact with the devil, so to speak.

The way things seem to be going, the end of free and open internet may come sooner than we think.

Not good.

Microsoft and News Corp potential alliance, against the open Web

reply to post by kommunist


The arrogance of Microsoft resulted the creation of Open web and this arrogance will further intensify the competition. Free people will always side with freedom lovers. They will hate the controls and will fight back the control mechanism.

I don't see how this is going to lead to closing the web. If News Corp. and Microsoft want to enter into a pact and make people pay for their stuff then that is fine, but it is going to give rise to more honest straight forward news sources.

Some people will pay for subscriptions, but this isn't going to lead to anything bad. Now if they pass Net-Neutrality laws then the web will be censored.

Just shows how microsoft are pure scum, indeed. Then also people like beck projecting his rubbish while his boss, wants to close free speech and transfer of information.

I for one will not use bing, google is bad, but at least they are not ms.