La nueva batalla contra Google

La primera señal de una batalla que comenzaba a levantarse, fue Rupert Murdoch aconsejando a los diarios (si quieren sobrevivir) comenzar a cobrar por contenidos en sus website. Una discusión que hasta hace poco era bastante artificial. Luego vino la ofensiva (no sé si es la palabra correcta) sobre Google (¿pirata o parásito?). Associated Press se sumó a las críticas, incluso sumó al Drudge Report y al Huffington Post, dos medios que en parte funcionan como agregadores y que indirectamente generan dinero con estos contenidos. A pesar de que YahooNews es más poderoso que Google, los dardos de los editores siguen apuntando al "monstruo": regalar contenidos es injusto, un robo y no genera ingresos. En medio de una crisis, la angustia se hace más profunda. La siguiente columna de Danny Sullivan, no sólo está llena de sarcasmo en contra de los medios tradicionales, sino que explica el porqué los diarios no pueden sostener su estrategia sobre la base de la calidad del contenido, mientras reciben gran cantidad de tráficos desde Google y otros agregadores. Hace un buen rato que Jarvis sugirió que los medios se dediquen a los contenidos y dejen el avisaje a Google. Para ellos el avisaje es el rey. Pero la resistencia continuará.

Por Danny Sullivan
It was a hostile audience. It was June 2007, at a conference center in London, where newspaper and magazine publishers were hearing how a new industry-backed search engine rights standard called ACAP was coming along. The day ended with an "issues" oriented panel. The audience didn't seem that pleased with me telling them they were full of shit about how important they thought they were and how awful they thought they had it from Google in particular.

I didn't phrase it like that, but that was the essence of my attitude. I'd rarely encountered so many people in one place with such a sense of entitlement. Worse, these were supposedly my own people. Newspaper folks, where I got my start in journalism. What an embarrassment.
I'm not talking the rank-and-file of newspapers, however -- the reporters and editors doing the grunt work. This crowd was full of publishers or editors of a different type, not wordsmithing and story assignment but looking out for the business issues.
ACAP -- the Automated Content Access Protocol -- was a convoluted system being developed at the time to "solve" the problems that newspapers and some other publishers felt they had with search engines. In particular, that they felt they should be able to selectively decide which pictures could be printed, how long stories could be listed and a number of other things all of which largely already could be controlled through existing systems (my past post, Search Engines, Permissions & Moving Forward In Copyright Battles, goes into this in more depth).