Time for Google, and Microsoft, to call Murdock’s bluff

There’s been a lot of go-round this past week about Rupert Murdock yanking everyone’s chain about pulling their content from Google unless the search giant is willing to cough up some money for the privilege of indexing News Corp properties. In fact both Duncan and I have written about the whole stupid mess here at The Inquisitr.

The most consistent statement that everyone has been making about the threats is that if Murdock was serious all it takes is a single line in the Robot.txt file on any of the News Corp servers and the bullshit poker game is done. On the other side is a bunch of folks saying that this is nothing more than a bargaining ploy by Murdock to try and get all the search companies to cough up some cash for access.

Well I’ve got another suggestion but this one goes to both Google and Microsoft.

Call his bluff.

Seriously. Pull all of News Corp content from your indexes and don’t have your search crawlers pull in any new data. After all neither of you are obligated in any fashion to index Murdock’s content. There are no laws saying that you have to index News Corp media sites.

If Murdock seriously thinks that he has the upper hand in this, that Google will collapse without the content and that Microsoft will truly do anything, no matter how stupid, in order to get even a percentage point over Google by paying News Corp blackmail money then I think it’s time to show him otherwise.

All Murdock is getting right now is more and more press as we babble on endlessly about the momentous battle of the search titans against the news titans. It’s bullshit people. Seriously. It’s all a game and I think that if Microsoft and Google in conjunction shut down any spidering of News Corp media properties we’d see in a very short time just who has the better hand here.

And it isn’t Murdock.

Think not?

Then check out Jeff Jarvis’ post today. He has some nice looking graphs showing just how little the 148 German newspapers who signed the Hamburg Declaration really matter to Google.

Here’s a hint….

… dick all.

C’mon Google and Microsoft – call an end to this farce. Call Murdock’s bluff. We’ll love ya for it.