"The current days of the internet will soon be over,"

Rupert Murdoch, the Sun King, has said it:

"The current days of the internet will soon be over".

But will that work? Andrew Sullivan, writing on his blog The Daily Dish comments:

"The current days of the internet will soon be over," - Rupert Murdoch. He's allegedly going to make you pay to read my column. James Joyner points out the difficulty of shoving the horse backwards into an empty stable:

'Pretty much everyone who has tried to charge for online news has failed. WSJ has been something of an exception but only because they’re selling specialized content to a niche audience with a strong incentive to pay for information. Even WSJ hasn’t tried to charge for its editorials, for example.

Chris Bertram passes along news of a recent survey showing that “Some 80 per cent of news stories in the quality UK national newspapers are at least partly made up of recycled newswire or PR copy.” Not only does that call into question whether they’re worth paying for but, more importantly, it demonstrates that most of the information is ubiquitous. Unless all the news producers band together into a cartel, shuttering it off from the non-paying public, any per-per-view scheme is doomed to fail.'"

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