Google calls Murdoch's piracy allegations ‘nonsense’
News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is talking nonsense, according to Google. — Murdoch, a Twitter user for only the past several weeks, used the service to unleash a barrage of accusations Saturday night against President Barrack Obama and Google.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Murdoch–Google feud is old, but its venue keeps changing. News Corp warned Google over copyright back in 2007, then in 2009 escalated over paywalls — Eric Schmidt publicly questioned Murdoch's online pay plan, and Murdoch threatened to pull his sites from Google's index entirely before backing off. What is new this weekend is the channel: Murdoch, weeks into using Twitter, went straight at Google and President Obama himself, no press release required.
The timing gives the outburst more reach than a tweet would normally earn. It lands in the middle of Washington's antipiracy fight — the Financial Times and NYT's Media Decoder both picked the story up on a day when the SOPA battle, including Wikipedia's planned Wednesday blackout, dominated the news cycle. Google's one-word rebuttal, calling the piracy allegations 'nonsense', turns a personal grievance into a public position in that legislative fight.
First-order effects
- Google is now publicly disputing the most powerful newspaper proprietor in the English-speaking world on his own chosen platform, forcing the company to defend its search and ad practices in the loudest possible forum rather than through lobbyists.
Second-order effects
- Murdoch's accusations hand the pro-SOPA camp a marquee talking point days before the Wikipedia blackout, while other publishers watch whether attacking Google by name moves legislators where trade-group letters have not.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, publisher–platform disputes migrate from negotiated de-indexing threats and executive interviews to social-media combat, with each side treating its own feed as the primary lobbying channel — and every accusation becoming a permanent, quotable artifact in the copyright wars.
The trend: Content owners and platforms are taking their copyright fights directly to social media, turning individual executives' accounts into instruments of legislative lobbying during the SOPA fight.