Greed Always Bursts the Bag

Last month, I wrote about Rupert Murdoch’s fighting words with the online tech universe (mainly, of course, Google). Well, Rupe’s tantrum has, if anything, gotten worse since then:

In an interview with Sky News Australia, the mogul said that newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web.

Simply astonishing. Greed, in the words of Sancho Panza, always bursts the bag. In fact, it bursts quite a few bags: the bags of reason, of self-interest, of integrity, of sanity. Once again, like his loyal subordinate Beck, Rupert is being a grandstanding, self-obsessed clown. Glenn’s going to have to teach him that crocodile-tears act: you wipe your eyes and cry, “Google is killing America and I want to stop it!”

Next comes the fun part, Rupe:

Once again, though, Rupe: your “goal” of blocking Google can be accomplished in about 30 seconds. For every website you own, do the following:

1. Open robots.txt in your site’s root directory and add the following: User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /. This specifically disallows Google; to ban all search engines, use the following: User-agent: *
Disallow: /.
2. Rinse, lather, and repeat for every site you own.
3. Watch and enjoy as your traffic takes a nosedive and your advertisers run as if they’re being stalked by Bill-O’s producer.