| "Being first mover doesn't give you the right to assert every piece of your argument." I'm not. You're just playing devil's advocate. The way you are responding, you have no interest in actually debating the idea. Can you explain why media companies "greatly benefit" from being excluded from major search engines? First of, Microsoft is providing an option for beleaguered newspapers. More options is universally better than less options right? Second, they're getting cash. And the newspaper companies (struggling with shrinking advertising and layoffs) are seriously considering the cash. So it seems the media thinks that cash is more beneficial. Can you show why this means that "beneficial" investigative journalism continues, increasing the overall welfare of citizens moreso than open access for search engines? For that matter, can you show that newspapers do more "long form" and expose more government corruption than bloggers do in aggregate? Yes. I'm not sure how to exactly prove this in an excel spreadsheet for you. What if newspapers accept this deal and transition to more "blog" articles and fewer "investigative" articles, leaving citizens with "no" investigative articles and no single search destination? Completely irrelevant to the argument at hand. Microsoft would have no hand in this. |