Online news sites rely heavily on incoming traffic from search engines and aggregator sites to attract visitors, so it might seem a little odd that Rupert Murdoch (a mogul in denial) would decide that these are bad for business. Yet that is exactly what appears to have happened in the case of Times Online which has banned leading UK news aggregator service NewsNow from linking to any content it publishes.

The blocking itself would appear to be a simple robots.txt protocol implementation, but the reasoning behind the action is a little more complex. After all, it is not as if NewsNow is scraping content or stealing stories to publish as its own for profit. All NewsNow does, in this case, is grab the headline of the story and link to it. Those links are then presented to anyone, for free, who visits the NewsNow site.

For one thing, such linking is a recognised and effective way to drive traffic to the publishing sites. here at IT Pro our stories, including this one, get linked to by NewsNow and if they are popular enough to get featured in the top ten section, for example, the additional traffic driven in this direction can be quite substantial. To prevent this linking would be the equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I’m also rather concerned that to prevent such linking is actually eroding a rather important freedom that, as a journalist, I do not want to see damaged in any way: the freedom to quote sources in stories, to link to those sources in stories and to comment upon the views of others reporting the news. This action by Murdoch smells bad to me, it stinks of an attempt to further restrict the rights of those reporting the news. Of course, the fact that Times Online journalists quote other stories, and link to them, cannot have escaped the irony detectors of everyone outside of the News International family.

According to a statement from NewsNow Managing Director Struan Bartlett, two million visitors to the NewsNow site each month will now no longer find headlines and links to Times Online content in their news search results. “It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out” Bartlett says, adding “we note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”

Good question, and one can only assume it is in order to test the waters on a relative small fry before tackling the big fish which have some seriously heavyweight legal resources to draw upon. NewsNow had already pulled links to newspaper websites which were covered by the Newspaper Licensing Agency from its subscription based service last month, after a change in policy required permissions to be sought and fees paid for circulating such links. That policy change has been, Bartlett says, to the Copyright Tribunal.

Oddly, News International was not involved in the NLA scheme but it has seemingly taken a similar stance albeit through this selective blocking process. As Bartlett concludes “the question remains whether News International, in arbitrarily blocking individual search engines, is trying to use its muscle to gain unreasonable control over the public’s freedom to choose the way they access information and news online”.

I’d be keen to hear what IT Pro readers think of this move, and in the meantime for more information you can visit the Right2Link campaign.

IT Pro