MediaSavvy

It’s not because I love Google, or I don’t think competition is good, or I hate Microsoft, or I think that Rupert Murdoch is a cancer on American democracy, or I don’t want journalism to be a business, but I can’t see how the public interest would be served if Microsoft paid Rupert Murdoch or anyone else to keep themselves out of Google’s database.

If this deal happens, I will block Bing’s robots from indexing my sites and I will tirelessly urge you do the same.

Bing needs Rupert more than he needs Bing, and Bing needs Rupert more than Google needs him, but Bing needs the rest of us more than they need the Wall Street Journal.

And we all need a good index of the Web.

• When you remove information from the index, you remove it from our collective memory.
• Our indexes of the Web must be as complete as possible.
• We need competition among indexes on the basis of performance and features, not exclusivity or artificial scarcity.
• In a truly competitive market, it is more profitable for a publisher to be in the index than it is to be out of the index.
• Smaller publishers need a truly competitive market if they are to succeed.
• If the Web devolves into a series of distribution deals among “media” companies and middle men (telcos, cable co’s, and search engines), it’s the commons, and all but the largest publishers that will be damaged.

I’m not sure what it means that I got the idea from a blog that has dropped off the face of the Web in the last 24 hours.