Friday, August 28, 2009

Free Market or Free Press?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,331106,00.html

I was sent this link today. This is a scary situation. Basically it has come to the point where Google banned a free press organization for sketchy reasons and people are pissed about it.

Now, if you know my philosophies on social and political action, I believe the market fixes and rations scarce resources. There are two problems that arise in this situation. One...the search engine "market" is virtually controlled by Google and two: news is not a scarce resource. News creates news creates news...to the point of infinity, as far as perceptions can read.
My first reaction was to think that maybe the government needs to force Google to maintain free press...but Google is a private organization and they reserve the right to include who they feel like. I then thought that maybe it is time for this guy to expand his news service so that he doesnt need Google to promote his press...why cant he operate a news business just like all other successful news organizations?

That might be a good solution, but at the same time, the demand for this kind of news might not be high enough to actually promote growth within that area of the market. In which case, one might view this situation as a negligable loss to society since people dont demand this news anyway.
The bottom line is, if people want to read this guys news, they can go directly to his website, use yahoo search, or the owner can expand his press himself or promote it in another fashion. Google is not in charge of the internet and they cannot stop news from travelling. Google is going to get a lot of negative attention for this, as Fox news has already given them, and I believe this was a poor business move on their part and they will have to deal with the consequences in the future...namely less profit.

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