Murdoch and Jobs – Frenemies of the Internet

Now we know why James Murdoch, heir apparent at NewsCorp, has been so messianic about the iPad recently. The Times/Sunday Times “apps” experiment is merely part of a bigger picture – perhaps a small one at that.

It has emerged – rather curiously via US fashion industry journal Women’s Wear Daily – that Murdoch Sr is working closely with Apple chief executive Steve Jobs on launching an entirely new, exclusively apps-driven newspaper (there will be no website or print ancillaries) that can be purchased on an iPad. Other tablet formats may follow (though Jobs’ views on this egalitarian gesture are unknown). What we can say is that the news vehicle will be called the Daily, that it will appear as early as the end of this month, that it has an upmarket skew, that it will cost 99 cents a week, and that it will probably be edited by NewsCorp’s blue-eyed boy Jesse Angelo, currently managing editor of The New York Post.

For the fuller implications of a personal alliance between these towering giants of the media and technology worlds, turn to Tim Berners-Lee. Spookily but – so far as I know – entirely independently, the founder of the internet has just published in Scientific American a searching critique of what he regards as internet abuse. Unwittingly, it provides considerable insight into why Murdoch and Jobs are batting in the same team.

Berners-Lee casts his net widely. He sees the internet – once a kind of communitarian brotherhood in virtual space – as increasingly under siege. The attack on its ‘inalienable’ freedoms comes from a number of sources, many of which are themselves firmly rooted in web culture. High on his list of targets, for example, are social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. To these he adds Google and US telecoms carrier Verizon, which earlier this year struck an agreement to exempt mobile access to the internet from web neutrality; that is, from the accepted principle that no web service may be prioritised over another by a pricing structure imposed on its delivery. And finally, he rounds on mobile and desktop applications – Apple’s in particular – which operate behind a walled garden of restricted access.

Berners-Lee’s wider point is that these forces have something in common. Each in its separate way is parcelling out the freedom to communicate on the internet by hiving off “silos of content”. Berners-Lee believes this development is a Bad Thing, because it will eventually choke off innovation by creating a more fragmented internet.

There is, however, another way of looking at Berners-Lee’s argument – and one likely to find far more favour with Messrs Murdoch and Jobs: turn it on its head.

While the internet remains a free, or “near-perfect” (in the economist’s jargon) market, no one can enjoy a lasting commercial advantage. Look no further than the record industry, or the media itself. This is good for internet joyriders, who want their news, views and music free, but unsustainable in the wider capitalist economy. Without a carefully managed investment programme and the principle of reasonable investor returns, innovation on the internet is just as likely to be stunted as it is by the dark forces of silo monopolies that Berners-Lee sees gathering on the virtual horizon.

Murdoch and Jobs have every reason to cooperate. The internet may, in the longer run, have much to lose if they do not.