Rather than simply defaulting to the view that news, analysis and opinion written by major news organizations should be free to everyone, Murdoch and Ballmer are exploring what looks on the surface to be an interesting model in an attempt to find new ways of simultaneously monetizing content and driving more web traffic to Bing. Murdoch recognizes his content, in all its forms, drives a lot of web traffic, some of it to his site, but in many cases the content ends up on sites where he gets no credit whatsoever, and therefore no revenue in terms of CPM value. In effect, News Corp is choosing a distribution partner that will value the content News Corp delivers, establishing a revenue stream that more fairly compensates them for the cost of creating it and the brand value News Corp has in the news industry. I look at this as a comprehensive content control and pricing strategy: If one assumes News Corp will begin putting pay-walls around its content (which they have done), and then near-simultaneously choosing a partner like Microsoft/Bing to control distribution of that content in a paid-distribution deal, then you have to call into question the ongoing justification of how the "fair use" copyright law allows Google and other search engines to use that content to drive traffic to their own sites and monetize it without paying a distribution fee for doing so. Indeed, Google draws lots of eyeballs to a site, but if all of a sudden The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, The New York Post, Boston Herald and a slew of international newspapers' content was available only on Bing, then that will surely help drive adoption of Bing as a legitimate -- and arguably better -- source of news stories than Google. No doubt it would take time to see the impact, but if News Corp cut an affiliate marketing and distribution deal with Microsoft, News Corp stands to make many times the revenue they would make compared to the traffic driven to them from other search engines. If this deal even smells like it might work, Microsoft should be in front of every major news publisher, including Reuters and AP, with a similar deal; there are only about 20 major media companies in the US that really matter, so not very hard to do if the deal gives content provides a good cut (say, 40% to 60%) of the revenues. Google's only response would be to try to compete on price, giving even better distribution deals to content providers -- a pretty darn scary situation if you have to start sharing that 67% gross profit margin with a stock price at ~$580/share. If Microsoft were to really get aggressive with this strategy, Ballmer could use Microsoft's cash-generating machines (the OS's and Apps side of its business) to vastly subsidize content compensation deals until the traffic pulled from Google created enough advertising revenue to reach a sustainable business model. How much would it take? I figure $10 to $15 billion given the current state of the newspaper/media industry, perhaps $25 billion worldwide. While not cheap, it would be a full frontal assault on Google's use of content and in the process change the definition of what "fair use" copyright means.