Murdoch 1 - Google 0

Google: Google has bowed to Rupert Murdoch, or at least nodded. After the media mogul threatened to remove News Corporation's content from the search engine and switch to rival Microsoft, Google will now allow publishers to restrict free access to subscription websites. The surprise concession isn't all that Murdoch, who has vowed to charge for web content by mid-2010, would want. But it is a step in the right direction.

The new model, effective immediately, means that Google’s internet users will no longer get unlimited access to news websites that require a subscription if accessed directly.

Publishers like the Financial Times, which have already implemented a paid subscription model, now have the option to limit free access to no more than five stories a day and redirect the user to a subscription page on the sixth click.

Murdoch’s threatening posture seems to have rattled Google, but exactly why is unclear. The search engine controls 65 per cent of internet traffic, delivering hits to content providers and increasing the amount of advertising revenue they can generate.

A simultaneous move by Murdoch to charge for content and delist it from Google, which generates 15 per cent of News Corp’s traffic, would probably have been much riskier for the publisher than for the search operator.

Google’s sudden turnaround may reflect a concern about what might happen if other publishers switch to Microsoft en masse. That's still a risk given the growing grumbles of the industry against the free rein, or as Murdoch calls it “theft”, that news aggregators have over content which is often expensive to produce.

Indeed, Google’s move is unlikely to appease Murdoch. Users of Google's news search service are likely to find the content they are looking for on a particular site after the first click — so allowing publishers to charge after five clicks doesn't amount to much. Murdoch hasn’t revealed how he intends to charge for web access to News Corporation’s content, but Google may need to do more to keep its news pages full.