Surely you’ve heard about the European News companies making a partnership with Microsoft to shut down their door on Google and get better content control with a new protocol like robots.txt of which the development would be funded by Microsoft. Well, unfortunately for these companies, what they fail to realize is that Google is in the position they think they are.
Usually, the case is these companies get so much traffic from Google that blocking it out would kill their business and let another take over. In other words, Google can do without them, but News Paper can’t.
Adversely, if every single news paper corporation was to block out Google until they accepted the new protocol, two scenarios could happen; namely millions of Internet users that don’t even know the difference between Google Search and the Internet going “huh? Where are the news” and complaining instead of switching to Bing, or Google accepting the protocol and putting an end to this madness, the later having much more chances of happening. Or, a third option would be that a clever News company would not embark on the Bing wagon and let Google fully index their news, which would eventually result in every visitor of Google News going on their web site instead, and that company taking in all the profits.
The result, a massive investment from old companies that’ll kill them no matter how they do it, because they failed to understand and adapt to the nature of the new content distribution format.
The same is sadly happening with the TV market, with companies like NBC planning to shut down great shows like Heroes just because they can’t figure out that they need to change the way they deliver TV.
