From Bloomberg News, from the San Francisco Chronicle
New York Times Should Charge for News, Google Too
Commentary by Janet Guyon
July 4 (Bloomberg) — Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google Inc. [and professor on leave from the UC Berkeley School of Information], spends a lot of time talking about the economic state of the news business, partly at the behest of the Federal Trade Commission, which wants to know how free online access has contributed to the financial difficulties of dozens of newspapers such as the Rocky Mountain News, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.
That Google has anything constructive to say may seem counterintuitive given that many folks who run large news organizations — News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, for instance — say that Google and its search engine are the principal cause of the declining advertising revenue at most print publications.
Varian has never run a business. His main credential in the debate is the book "Information Rules" that he wrote in 1999 with Carl Shapiro, a fellow professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In it, Varian and Shapiro apply durable business and economic rules to the Internet with particular attention to the value and pricing of information. So while he's no newspaperman, he has given the economics of news considerable thought....
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