Putting The Screws To Google
How Old Media could take back its share of search's ad bounty — What if 2006 is the year big media players take aim at Google's (GOOG ) kneecaps? No, not with more lawsuits; the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers — on behalf, in part …
Context & Ripple Effects
This column lands at the tail end of a year in which publisher anxiety about Google went mainstream: New York Magazine had already diagnosed the mood as "Googlephobia" in November 2005, and October reporting showed the coalition was not monolithic — some writers sided with Google rather than with the Authors Guild suing it.
Against that backdrop, Jon Fine's Business Week piece is a strategic provocation, not a news event: he floats the unconfirmed idea that old media could go beyond the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers lawsuits already aimed at Google's book-scanning program and start contesting the company's hold on search-advertising economics itself. Its significance is that it reframed copyright suits as an opening bid in a fight over who captures the ad bounty that indexed content generates.
First-order effects
- Google enters 2006 facing confirmed legal challenges from both the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers while a prominent Business Week voice publicly urges publishers to escalate from copyright claims to the ad-money question.
- Publishers reading the column get a template for collective action: treat indexing and search placement as a bargaining chip rather than free distribution.
Second-order effects
- If major media houses act on Fine's framing, Google's response would set terms for every other aggregator — rivals and partners alike inherit whatever licensing or revenue-share precedent emerges from the standoff.
- Newspapers and book publishers gain leverage in direct deals with portals, since credible threats to withhold or charge for content change the default price of access.
Third-order effects
- A sustained publisher push would push the industry toward explicit compensation norms for content used in commercial search and aggregation, replacing the tacit free-indexing assumption of the early web era.
- The litigation track risks hardening into a structural divide between platforms that capture ad value from others' content and owners demanding a cut — a fault line regulators may eventually be drawn into.
The trend: Content owners are moving from grudging tolerance of search engines toward organized attempts to claim a share of the advertising revenue their material attracts.