{"id":4956,"date":"2013-01-28T19:59:58","date_gmt":"2013-01-29T01:59:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4956"},"modified":"2013-01-28T19:59:58","modified_gmt":"2013-01-29T01:59:58","slug":"googles-media-barrons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4956","title":{"rendered":"Google&#8217;s Media Barrons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/harpers.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/googles-media-barons\/\">John McArthur<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>I had to cheer when I read the news the other week about a French company that\u2019s selling an ad-blocking service on the Internet. Xavier Niel, the entrepreneurial owner of the web-service provider Free, is threatening to smash the advertiser-supported \u201cfree-content\u201d model. That model has transformed Google\u2019s Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt into media barons who make William Randolph Hearst look like a small-time operator. Niel, it seems, would also like to make the Internet \u201cfree,\u201d but in a way that horrifies the so-called content providers \u2014 that is free of paid advertising.<\/p>\n<p>As publisher of a magazine that specializes in substantive, complex, and occasionally lengthy journalism and literature, and that also lives off advertising, I\u2019ve long objected to Google\u2019s systematic campaign to steal everything that isn\u2019t welded to the floor by copyright \u2014 while playing nice with its idiotic slogan \u201cDon\u2019t be evil.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As a journalist and board member of the Authors Guild, I\u2019ve watched in dismay as writers, living and dead, have suffered steep drops in income and copyright control thanks to Google\u2019s \u2014 and its smaller rivals\u2019 \u2014 logistical support for pirating and repackaging everything that we writers, editors, and publishers hold dear. From the humblest newspaper reporter to the most erudite essayist, we do the work, we invest the money and time, some of us risk our lives \u2014 and Google, broadly speaking, reaps the benefits without spending a dime.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John McArthur: I had to cheer when I read the news the other week about a French company that\u2019s selling an ad-blocking service on the Internet. Xavier Niel, the entrepreneurial owner of the web-service provider Free, is threatening to smash the advertiser-supported \u201cfree-content\u201d model. That model has transformed Google\u2019s Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}