Toward the end of a week in which the paywalls debate has been skewed in to a cartoon Murdoch-vs-Google (NSDQ: GOOG) war that doesn’t necessarily exist, the search engine hosted a regular meet-the-press session at its UK headquarters Thursday night.
Managing director Matt Brittin, who has been doing the rounds in news copy and in parliament this week on the topic, agreed to give me another interview (audio) on the topic that’s been dominating London’s Googleplex…
There’s little different here from the party line that Google has been putting out over the last few days (Google’s just a search site, it offers papers AdSense). But that’s about all that Google can do until either it bows to apparent publisher demands or the prosecutors, of what some are now describing as a “phony war“, put down their weapons. But anyway…
“I’ve seen lots of headlines … Underneath the headlines, the reality is rather different,” Brittin said.
“Media companies are going through a difficult transition, see the internet affecting their long-established business models, they look around for somebody to blame and it’s easy to blame Google, who have been successful online.”
