Let's say News Corp and Microsoft did this. Let's also assume that News Corp did other things to monetize their data, such as putting it behind a paywall, preventing bloggers from quoting large sections of articles, if the Tories win the British election getting them to shut down the BBC's news website, etc.
I think this could be an enormous opportunity for Google. They could create their own news service (or maybe buy one). They could integrate it with Google Ads, Reader, allow commenting social bookmarking, etc done in an open way to get as much external take-up of the information as possible, and maybe integrate it with Google Maps so that people could have a personalised local news service.
The cost of this? BBC News has an annual budget of £350 million, so something in that area.
If a lot of Google's competitors are voluntarily de-listing themseves from the open internet, everyone would flock to Google's option.
Google doesn't even have to build a news research organization. there are enough people who see the opportunity and offer copies of news, and rephrased news, given the ad revenue that would become availble. it just has to make few changes to it's search engines, expose data from their toolbars/queries on popular news articles/subjects , and let the newspapers fight with tons of sites offering their content, or very similar contents for free.
I think this could be an enormous opportunity for Google. They could create their own news service (or maybe buy one). They could integrate it with Google Ads, Reader, allow commenting social bookmarking, etc done in an open way to get as much external take-up of the information as possible, and maybe integrate it with Google Maps so that people could have a personalised local news service.
The cost of this? BBC News has an annual budget of £350 million, so something in that area.
If a lot of Google's competitors are voluntarily de-listing themseves from the open internet, everyone would flock to Google's option.