I think what annoys murdoch et al. is that they are dealing with a commercial entity (Google) over which they have very little leverage, if any. This puts them in a very weak negotiating position. However, I read an article recently speculating on whether it might be in their interest to foster competition between search engines for their content, and in particular between Bing and Google. To do this, the article suggested they ban Google from indexing their content, and get Microsoft to pay them for the privilege. http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?st... The open question with this strategy is whether they could make enough money from Microsoft to offset the loss of click through revenue from Google. Moreover, it is unclear whether they could get sufficient scale to hurt Google in terms of the number of news organisations that participate.