Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

OPINION:Google’s cheap assembly of expensively created news content threatens the independence and quality of journalism, writes TIM LUCKHURST.

GOOGLE BOSS Eric Schmidt deserves a kind of respect, the kind a sparrow gives a cat. For the chairman of a company that uses expensive journalism for free to address the Newspaper Association of America takes cheek as well as guts. And Schmidt’s manner combines insolence with chutzpah. His support for the economic model whereby newspapers pay for content and Google milks the profits provoked Robert Thomson, the editor of the Times of London, to describe content aggregators as “tapeworms in the intestines of the internet”.