I don't think at this point any of us can assume that the news we currently read freely on the internet will remain that way for the years to come.

In an Interview with David Speers on Sky News Australia, News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch declared he would effectively block Google from searching News Limited websites.  This is not a threat; it is a realistic way to stop what he calls the 'stealing' of News' stories without payment.  Mr Murdoch referred to Google, Microsoft ASK.com and others.

His thoughts are that the 'occasional' visitors are not enough to support the model that currently exists.  He would prefer to have fewer visitors to his websites, if in fact they were paying.

So how exactly can he do this?  Well it's easy - Google and all reputable search engines allow for any website owner to block the 'robots' which trawl the web from accessing their websites, and in doing so preventing them from indexing the content into their search databases.

Google makes it very clear how to remove website content from their index - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156412

The question is - why would you.  For most businesses that would be the worst possible thing they could do.  Imagine selling Water Bottles and never appearing in a Google Search for "Water Bottles" - you may as well close up shop.

However, for Rupert Murdoch and perhaps many more to follow, this is a viable outcome.  You see by stopping the robots at the front page, they don't have the opportunity to take a copy of each and every article for their own database.

The argument from Google and loads of Users is that Google (and others) simply provide an index of the news and stories that are floating around the Internet, and they then link directly to the news website for that story.

Problem for Rupert is that creates a new way of using news, hand picking stories rather than taking in the whole offering.

Think of it in the 'traditional media' sense - this would be like walking into your newsagent and asking for a copy of all the articles on 'Barack Obama' and being handed a clipping from the Daily Telegraph, one from the Australian, one from the Sydney Morning Herald and a few magazine articles too.

Rupert Murdoch would prefer you picked up the whole paper, and flicked through it.  In the 'new media' he'd prefer you came to his home page, and clicked around to the things that interest you.

The approaches really are poles apart and there won't be a clear winner.  More likely there will simply be two very different models in the future.  And a lot of legal challenges.  The many 'bloggers' and 'independent' writers online will need to be rock solid in their attribution and crediting of sourcing material if they are to avoid the allegations from News Corporation (and others) of Stealing stories.  That's just another fun side show to this whole story.

What of the idea that Rupert might actually be playing bluff here, or more particularly angling for a better slice of the Google pie.

I think frankly, this has some real merit.

Recently, both Bing (Microsoft) and Google entered into search deals with Twitter.  Twitter is a bit player compared to News Corporation in terms of content.  Yet Google and Bing have both paid (Large sums of money) to get direct access to the 'fire hose' of 'tweets' coming from every Joe Bloggs on Twitter.  Why? Because they want to be the aggregator of that content, they want to use it to create new and powerful measures of what is important, who is important and what's going on 'real time' on the Internet.

So how does News Corporation fit in here?

Over to Jason Calacanis.  Jason is an entrepreneur.  He has made every dollar he has on the Internet, ideas, start-ups etc.  He hosts a weekly Internet TV show called 'This Week in Startups' and recently (Before Rupert Murdoch made his statement re removing News content from Google) discussed how the 'Big Content Providers' could rally together to effectively 'Kill Google'.

While I think that's a big ask, and frankly an impossible one - I think there is some merit in what he says.

The video clip is below, but in simple terms, Calacanis is suggesting that if News Limited and a host of other big content makers teamed up and all remove their sites from the Google Index, but not from Bing, it would in fact move market share in 'Search' from Google to Bing. 

You see, without those pages in their search index, people searching for 'Barack Obama' would never see stories published by News Limited and the 'Group' of publishers who join this quest.

If people start realising that by using Bing you will see these results - life starts looking very good for Microsoft.

This is not how I see it panning out, instead, I think we might see some sort of 11th hour deal going on between the big content players and the big search players, which might in fact give them better access to the content, in a more real time or prioritised manner, while still making it free to the end user.  News would then be getting paid for its content, just not by the end reader, instead by the middle man.

An interesting concept, which, if it doesn't happen will mean we're all shelling out a few dollars here and there for ongoing access to the biggest publishers of news around the world.

Interesting times ahead. Let me know what you think in the comments below..