Sweeting says he thinks many of the major media companies would love to see computers discourage people from searching the open Internet for content.
"I think the media companies will leap at this," he says. "It offers them the opportunity to essentially re-create the old business model, wherein they are pushing content to you on their terms rather than you going out and finding content, or a search engine discovering content for you."
Overhead-heavy bloated media corporations, like Murdoch's, who want to "put a tollbooth on the ocean" are betting the house that locked up media readers will save their outdated 20th century business models.
Murdoch newspapers like The Australian are already planning to do away with their print versions, at least on a daily basis. It's the only way they can survive. The sums have been done and print must go. Here's The Australian's editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell :
"When you remove the fixed costs in newspapers, they become much more viable. So if you think of a newspaper without paper and ink and petrol and trucks, you're taking out between 60 and 70 per cent of the cost base...."But I guess my view is that the core of the business is your ability to dream up ideas to create news - the things that we chase each day. "
"Dream up ideas to create news." What a curious thing to say, or to reveal about how the newsrooms of a corporate news empire actually work.
And you thought their job was to simply report the news.
