News Puts Out Feeds: Now Cries Foul

Search engines challenged on "theft"

The companies that report the news have now found a new scapegoat for low readership and ratings: Google.

What really is happening here is that they want a piece of the revenue Google gets for doing exactly what they made possible by distributing their own RSS feeds. The ironic thing is that most news is put together by the wire agencies - AP, UPI, etc. - and the newspapers, et al. are only re-publishing the same story as every other publisher who subscribes to that news agency.

In essence, they're mad because Google is re-aggregating what they aggregated from other sources in the first place...and making money on it that they think belongs in their pockets instead.

Since it's their own RSS feeds that Google uses to aggregate their news, the publishers are going to be hard-pressed to make their case stick. I think the end result of the case will be a judgment that this is nothing more than sour grapes because someone else found a way to do the publishers' job better than they did it...