John MacArthur, the publisher of the venerable Harper’s
magazine, which still resists free online content, is peeved at
Google. And for good reason!
I had to cheer when I read the news the other week about a
French company that’s 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
“free-content” model. That model has transformed Google’s 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 “free,” but in a way
that horrifies the so-called content providers — that is free of
paid advertising.
….I’ve long objected to Google’s systematic campaign to steal
everything that isn’t welded to the floor by copyright….
This for-profit theft is committed in the pious guise of
universal access to “free information,” as if Google were just a
bigger version of your neighborhood public library…
This is nonsense, of course. Google’s bias for search results
that list its own products above those of its competitors is now
well-known, but equally damaging, and less remarked, is the bias
that elevates websites with free content over ones that ask readers
to pay at least something for the difficult labor of writing,
editing, photographing, drawing, and painting and thinking
coherently. Try finding Harper’s Magazine when
you Google “magazines that publish essays” or “magazines that
publish short stories” — it isn’t easy.
A couple of years back, in the context of MacArthur’s very
progressive attempt to keep
his staff from unionizing, I noted:
People whose intellectual lives began this century might know
this venerable publication Harper’s, available to
most only on “paper,” as but a dim memory. But trust me, as someone
who has felt its intensely frightening weight in my very hands this
very month, it’s out there. And someday, you might
find that out for yourself. (The New
York article effectively mocks MacArthur’s fear and
hatred of using the Web as a way to communicate with readers, make
money, or allow the world to know the mag still exists.)
I took on Harper’s peculiar
anti-market snobbery in the previous century. … Read More
