As a Brit, I find it amusing to see him attack the BBC. While it is not perfect, it is ours and we are generally proud of it. We pay for the organisation and most of us are glad it exists independently of the commercial world – well mostly anyway. If his alternative is to have ‘Fair and Balanced’ news like Fox, he can stick it.

But, yes – he is right to call the shots and start charging for content. Google and all the others are leeching content. Thank goodness for Google and its like but we need content creators to survive too.

“Google sends millions of people to newspaper sites. Newspaper sites couldn’t survive without it.”

That’s not in my article. There’s nothing like that I even said that you could paraphrase for the second sentence.

Newspaper sites could survive just fine without Google. The Wall Street Journal survived just fine for years until it willingly decided it wanted more traffic and opened up more of its content to Google. Murdoch’s free to shut his site all he wants. I wish he’d just get on with it rather than all this constant yapping about it.

It would also be nice if clarified what on earth he actually wants. He complains a lot about Google, with a general tone that he thinks Google’s listing his content (listing headlines and summaries) in some way that might require a license. But he hasn’t sued them; he hasn’t yet pulled out of them. Put up a solution or use an existing one.