Kyle Eden
Blog # 8
Soc 313

In an apparent concession to angry news organizations, Google (GOOG: 586.25, 1.24, 0.21%) said Tuesday it will let publishers set a limit on the number of articles readers can view for free through the Internet giant’s search engine.

Google will let publishers limit readers to five free articles per day.

The move comes as news executives have escalated their criticism of Google, which they accuse of reaping billions of dollars in profits by publishing free content. Meanwhile, many news organizations are struggling as advertising revenues have dwindled in recent years.

Critics have included News Corp. (NWSA: 12.26, 0.23, 1.91%) Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who has specifically targeted aggregators such as Google News that pull together snippets and links to news from a variety of sources. Aggregators, according to the critics, collect advertising revenue for these snippets without compensating the news organizations that produce news stories.

Murdoch has threatened to block Google from displaying its news articles and has reportedly held talks with Microsoft (MSFT: 29.79, -0.19, -0.63%) about giving its Bing search engine exclusive access to some or all of News Corp.’s news content.

News Corp. is publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and NewsCore. The Journal already levies subscription fees for access to some of its content online. News Corp. is also publisher of FOXBusiness.com.

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This is a good example of social control by the media. Because google has become a massive search engine, many people can find many articles that they normally would have to pay for. This controls how much users can access and what we can and can't read for free. I can see the side of the companies wanting to people to pay for these articles because people hard at writing these articles and should deserved to be paid for their work. But as a reader of articles if I have to pay for an article I will not pay to read an article.