 Press Release
News International Blocks NewsNow from Linking to
All Times Online Content
8 Jan 2010
Britain’s largest homegrown news aggregator accuses NI of undermining
freedom of access to public information
London, UK: NewsNow.co.uk, Britain’s largest homegrown news
aggregator, has been told by News International (NI) that it may no
longer link to any content on Times Online.
As a consequence of this action — apparently the first change to the
Times Online’s blocking policy since May 2008 — two million visitors
to NewsNow.co.uk every month will no longer find headlines and links
to content on the Times Online site in their news search results.
According to Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of
NewsNow: “It is lamentable that News International has chosen to
request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound
traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it
looks as though NewsNow has been singled out. We note that no other
major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is
not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part
of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why
block us and not them?”
The blocking has been technically implemented via the robots.txt
protocol, a convention for requesting search engines, web spiders and
other web robots refrain from asking for pages from all or part of a
website.
Continues Bartlett: "We can understand why a website would attempt to
block a search engine that was abusing its resources or blatantly
stealing content. But this clearly isn’t the case with NewsNow. The
freedoms to link and quote sources and compare and contrast reported
views are press freedoms on which News International itself relies.
Arbitrary attacks on news search engines therefore undermine press
freedom, as well as the entire basis on which the Internet runs. NI is
asking us to accept restrictions on our freedom to link to publicly
available information that it would not accept itself."
In December 2009, NewsNow decided to pull all links to many national
newspaper websites from its subscription service following attempts by
The Newspaper Licensing Agency Limited (the NLA) to impose a scheme
that introduced the requirement to obtain permission and pay fees to
circulate links to freely available web pages. The scheme has
subsequently been referred to the Copyright Tribunal.
Although News International is not party to the scheme, it may be the
first major UK media organisation to try to introduce the same
requirement through selectively blocking search engines from linking
to its websites. Concludes Bartlett: “The question remains whether
News International, in arbitrarily blocking individual search engines,
is trying to use its muscle to gain unreasonable control over the
public’s freedom to choose the way they access information and news
online. These are precisely some of the reasons why we and many others
support The Right2Link Campaign.”
About NewsNow
NewsNow.co.uk (aka NewsNow) has been aggregating links to Internet
news since it was founded in 1997. Today, it is the UK’s largest
homegrown news aggregator. It has 20 percent of the market, second
only to Google.
Fully automated, and on a continuous basis, NewsNow updates breaking
headlines linking to news websites all around the world. NewsNow’s
mission is to help provide people with links to the news they need to
read, and publishers with people to read the news they write.
Today NewsNow links to over 37,000+ news sources, including top news
publications. NewsNow.co.uk performs an important public interest
role, by referring people to mainstream and alternative news on a
single platform.
NewsNow operates by matching breaking news articles, in real time,
against keyword-based topic specifications, delivering relevant links
to users, and relevant readers to publishers.
NewsNow relies on a combination of advertising, sponsorship, and
subscription revenues to fund its services.
The NewsNow.co.uk website, which is among the UK’s top web sites, is
generally visited by over 2 million users monthly and receives more
than 100 million page views per month.
NewsNow.co.uk is the founding sponsor of The Right2Link
Campaign.
For further press information:
Struan Bartlett
Managing Director and Chairman
NewsNow
NewsNow is a trademark of NewsNow Publishing Limited.
Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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