Brown speaks out against Murdoch's paywalls

Newscorp boss Rupert Murdoch has some strong opinions on Google and free media content. Let’s just sum things up by saying he’s against it. Recently though, the Newscorp magnate’s plan to charge for access to the Times and Sunday Times online came under attack from an unlikely challenger: Gordon Brown.

In an interview with the Radio Times, later picked up by the Guardian, the British Prime Minister declared it was unlikely that the trend for free online news and content would be reversed. In full election campaign mode, he said that web users have got too used to accessing content without having to pay for it, and that they wouldn’t stand for a return to paywall restrictions.

Free basic news

The Prime Minister did, however, agree that a certain amount of content should be paid for: ‘People will pay for certain things, and should pay for certain things,’ he said, ‘but I think there's a whole sort of element of communication that's got to be free. People mind paying for basic news.’

What about the BBC’s licence fee?

But with Gordon Brown also supporting the BBC’s licence fee funding system, some could see his defence of ‘free basic news’ as slightly contradictory. After all, isn’t the licence fee essentially a way of obliging users to pay for content at source?

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