Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, is preparing to de-index his news sites from Google in the next few months and is also trying to get other media companies on board.

I didn’t really believe him at first, as I couldn’t figure out how a company would profit by making its content hard to find.

Then Jason Calacanis, who used to work for Murdoch’s Digital Chief Jonathan Miller when the two were at AOL, posted a video last week with a simple suggestion: Not only should Murdoch de-index from Google, but he should get Bing to pay him for the exclusive right to index it.

Tech Pundits may be thinking that if other media companies joined Murdoch, Google could actually find itself in a very difficult position, where Bing had content that Google didn’t. Due to this, mainstream search users would suddenly have a big reason to go to Bing.

But this is not about Bing or Google or “Shift of Balance of Power” in search. This is significantly bigger. If News Corp goes through with the de-indexing and then goes and sells the rights, there will finally be a business model for both small and large content producing entities.

All websites will start participating and content will once again cost money. Following that, the major search engines will become subscription style services with niche search engines being a big new industry and the whole landscape turns into cable television through your computer.

As a knowledge repository, the content of the web is useless once information is not being indexed or put behind pay walls. This wall creates scarcity, which creates demand, which creates value, which creates pay walls.

Here is a conjecture on how it’s going to play out:

  1. Twitter licenses content to search engines.
  2. News Corporation and others in media industry license content to search engines.
  3. Soon, medium sized blogs want money for getting their content indexed.
  4. Google and other search engines come up with a “ContentSense” program to allow everyone on the Web get paid to provide content.
  5. Back to SQUARE ONE. Zero Sum Game.

There is nothing smart or ingenious about Murdoch beating the big bad Google or siding with Bing in an attempt to leverage a business.

The implications should be considered which are far greater than a school yard fight.