Murdoch "ready to sue" Google

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 1 Mar 2010 at 07:59

News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch is "ready to sue" Google over the search giant's indexing of his newspaper content, according to reports.

Murdoch has waged a vitriolic war of words with Google over the past year or so, accusing the search company of getting a free ride on News Corp's journalism with services such as Google News.

Now, in a detailed profile of Murdoch published in the New York Times, a senior media executive claims Murdoch is ready to see the search giant in court. "He’s pretty tightly wound up over Google and has been ready to sue them,” the executive claims. “He doesn’t trust them at all.”

Another unnamed executive from MySpace, the flagging social-networking site that Murdoch paid $580m for in 2005, claims Murdoch is ill at ease in the internet sphere. "“Digital is out of his comfort zone,” he told the newspaper. “It’s much more the Wild West. He gets the raw-competition part of it, but he’s never been in a place where the business model isn’t clear. The destruction is just happening so fast.”

However, the newspaper reveals that Murdoch hasn't always reserved the skunk eye for Google. "We would be sitting in meetings, and he’d go on and on about the Google guys, and how they had dry cleaning and massages, and what a great company and culture it was," a former News Corp employee claims.

Murdoch and his wife are also said to be close friends with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, although that friendship is reported to have foundered "given the heated nature of their conflict".