There's a pattern here. In his war against aggregation of news by the likes of Google, his henchmen -- some of whom have since had to leave the company in the hacking scandal -- gave all sorts of disreputable labels to Google, which Arianna Huffington helpfully
aggregated in testimony before the FTC:
"So now sites that aggregate the news have become, in the words of Rupert Murdoch and his team, '
parasites,' 'content
kleptomaniacs,' '
vampires,' 'tech
tapeworms in the intestines of the Internets,' and, of course,
thieves who 'steal all our copyright.'"
You see, Murdoch is against more than just piracy. He is against the fundamental architecture of the web and the net. He cannot see past old models of owning content and selling it and cannot see new ways to make money through using content to generate signals about people and built relationships with them to target higher-value, relevant content, services, and advertising. Facebook understand that. Google and Twitter and Foursquare understand that. Murdoch does not. That's why MySpace failed. That's why Murdoch's earlier internet efforts -- starting with Delphi, where I briefly served as head of content -- went through millions of dollars: because he thinks the content business is about products -- as it used to be -- not people -- as it is now.
Murdoch doesn't hate Google. He still doesn't understand it.