Vanity Fair has an article out about Rupert Murdoch taking on the idea of free content on the internet. The upshot is that he’s not doing this because he cares about content, but because he’s hemorrhaging money.
When I got to this, however, I laughed myself out of my chair:
Murdoch’s abiding love of newspapers has turned into a personal antipathy to the Internet: for him it’s a place for porn, thievery, and hackers. In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase—before its fortunes sank under News Corp.’s inability to keep pace with advances in social-network technology—I congratulated him on the acquisition. “Now,” he said, “we’re in the stalking business.”
As the quote notes, Murdoch bought MySpace, and lustily so. What the quote leaves out is that MySpace was created by people who thieved, hacked and sold porn. In the entire MySpace story there are no heroes: only people purposefully walking the line between legal and illegal, moral and immoral.
That Rupert Murdoch — Rupert Murdoch! — is now offended by these types, is riotously funny and richly ironic.
— Mark Barrett