Rupert Murdoch has it in for Google more than I ever could

Rupert Murdoch
Monika Flückiger/Creative Commons

And people thought I was de-Googling my life or being mean to Google. What about Mr Murdoch and his entire firm?
   We all know his comments about how he wanted to block Google News’s bot and had spoken out against that. While little happened on that front with the exception of The Times going behind a paywall, it does appear that MySpace now blocks Blogger and Blogspot.
   This thread from a MySpace user on the Google forums was fascinating to read.
   If you attempt to link to Blogger via MySpace, this is the message you’ll get:

Sorry, you have reached a link that is no longer accessible due to one or more of the following:
—A reported spammer site
—A reported Phishing Site: A site designed to trick the user into giving up user name and passwords.
—A site which contains malware
—A site that currently contains a lot of spam
—The user entered HTML syntax was inaccurate.

   MySpace responded to the user:

We’ve recently discovered that BlogSpot pages are being used by spammers to send spam, so all links to that site have been disabled. Although you or your blog may not be associated with or linked to spam or spammers, to protect all MySpace Profiles from spam, phishing, and online scams, all links to BlogSpot are blocked.

   When he pushed more, asking, how on earth a blog could send out spam, MySpace replied:

BlogSpot pages are being used by spammers to send spam, so all links to that site have been disabled. Although you or your blog may not be associated with or linked to spam or spammers, to protect all MySpace Profiles from spam, phishing, and online scams, all links to BlogSpot are blocked.

   You might think: who cares about MySpace? But it is a very interesting, though perhaps not the best thought-out move, from this News Corp. subsidiary, that will likely wind up annoying legitimate users. As much as I dislike Blogger, I have to agree with the MySpace user’s queries: how on earth could linking to Blogger allow Blogger to send spam back to MySpace?
   Still, everything I’ve said over 2010 about Google is nothing like an instruction from Rupert Murdoch—and this perhaps shows just how much the firm is prepared to get into Google’s way.


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