Last weekend’s SMH business section ran on its front page the headline ‘Google Monster’ publicly revealing for the first time a potential catastrophe everyone in ICT and media has been secretly fearing for years.
It has to be the biggest of elephants in the room, since it involves that all conquering internet search tool the public just can’t get enough of which is sweeping the entire business world and in the process turning whole industries on their heads.
The true extent of the threat posed by Google to the entire newspaper industry here in Australia has finally been revealed by one of its most well known prospective victims John Fairfax.
In recent months media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been single-handedly leading the overseas counter attack with plans to charge for all News Corp online content, influenced no doubt by the success of his latest acquisition the Wall Street Journal. However, the subscription model is very much the exception to the publishing rule world-wide and most industry observers doubt the general public will ever be prepared to pay for what they have now been receiving free for years.
Most people in publishing, and the media generally, acknowledge there has not been such a sea change of this magnitude since the industrial revolution and grudgingly accept the famously ‘do no evil’ guys from Mountain View are poised to destroy, or at least significantly damage, an influential industry that has dominated our society and culture for literally hundreds of years and employed thousands of people – whether they realise it or not.
Ironically, some of the really important issues involved here are still not appearing in print which tends to suggest that the publishers were prepared to go along with Google’s covert plans so long as they thought they had a fair share of the spoils.
It has to be conceded that the elegance (and power) of the Google business model is that it prospers by giving the public free something someone else produces and which it does not pay for.
Of course, it does share some of the riches but Google usually does not reveal to its affiliates or AdSense partners what it actually earns itself or even the percentage it passes on which, when you think about it, is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile when you consider the actual costs of creating valuable content.
How long can newspapers create content for Google to give away is the bottom line? You would have to think newspapers can’t maintain the status quo indefinitely as ‘search’ mops up more and more of ‘their’ advertising spend.
But I do have a caveat. Radio and TV have also been giving away editorial content created by newspapers for decades – so why should this be any different?
You have to realise Google is not just a search engine; it is so much more, and most importantly it is a media.
What’s more, it’s a media poised to become the dominant media and wrestle control, for the first time in history, of public opinion by a small number of influential and largely un-elected people.
Think about it: people-to-people broadcasting … that cannot be all bad! | 
