End of the free net?

The recent news that Rupert Murdoch is expected to extend his charging scheme from the Wall Street Journal and The Times websites to other titles would not normally have been a major cause for concern among the internet community and SEO experts in particular. However with Microsoft having stepped into the fray, Murdoch may be about to push a major share of the search market onto Bing by giving only Microsoft's search engine exclusive access to the news stories on those websites.

It will be interesting to see how this situation may pan out as while Bing may attain an instant growth by the deal (mostly from the business sector) Google could be expected to remain the popular choice  for general news and non business related searches.

It is however of great concern that this kind of deal can make such a difference to the way we search the internet and the freedom of information that users currently enjoy.