THE news that Google is spending $7m on newspaper ads all round the world makes me, as a newspaper journalist, feel as if it were Christmas but a snowy, cold Christmas, and I am a peasant whom King Wenceslas has seen gathering scraps of wood with which to boil a nourishing pot of water.
Now the king — or Eric Schmidt, Google`s chairman — rides out from his castle with his page and graciously orders him to give me a meal taken from the luxurious dinner in the great hall. Well, it`s delicious, all right. Don`t think I am complaining. But once the king has gone, and I am once more huddled in the draughty hut he will still be the king, and I the peasant sharecropper.

In the new world, we will all be sharecroppers for Google. In the old days, people paid for their newspapers. In the future, so far as anyone can see, they will not pay for anything that they do not get direct from advertisers and the function of news is merely to attract people to advertisements. That has always been truer than journalists would like to believe. But in the new wintry world of the Internet, this cold truth forms, like the snow, the background to everything we see.

Of course there are plenty of journalists who write for the attention. But I suspect that most of them have thought the attention was directed at them, and for their benefit; not at the ads behind them. Only the people who made money from newspapers understood how they made money. Lord Beaverbrook even coined a law expressing his secret “Any journalist may be replaced by any other journalist.”

But the people who make money from news now don`t own the papers. They own Google and their motto might be one step beyond Lord Beaverbrook`s “Any newspaper may be replaced by any other newspaper.”

This doesn`t make Google malevolent, any more than the sainted King Wenceslas was malevolent. He owned his castle, and his peasants, and if he didn`t, someone else would. Sure enough, the real Wenceslas was slaughtered by his brother, and though Google looks much more secure than that it would be silly to bet on its still being the company that owns the marketplace in 50 years` time. By then people may not even know that they are entering a marketplace when they type, or talk on to a screen or perhaps a holographically configured section of the local air. They will just suppose that the air is full of magic. But it`s a sure bet that someone will be making money off the magic, and it won`t be us.

And now Google is moving into the book trade. These advertisements are part of its plan to digitise the contents of almost all the important libraries in the world and make their contents available for free. The copyright holders, at whom the legal-notice ads are directed, will be paid out of a licensing arrangement, as if they were musicians being broadcast over the radio. Speaking as someone who last year made £37.50 from public lending rights, I can see a snag in this plan, but that is hardly Google`s fault.

If new book publishing ever moves into purely electronic forms, writers will be even worse off, because printing a book turned out a really resilient, simple, and widely accepted form of copy protection. If books are ever as easily copied as digital music, it will be dreadful news for anyone who writes them.

A brief and frightening glimpse of the future there was provided by the bankruptcy of one of Amazon`s suppliers in the UK last month, who left a warehouse of books for anyone to collect for free. Sure enough, hundreds of people turned up and filled their cars. Does anyone really think these collectors will spend more money on other books as a result? Yet that is the argument that boosters of music piracy constantly make.

No for a market to exist there must be laws and the means to enforce them. Peasants feared bad kings, but they feared anarchy more, and with good reason. Google, like Wenceslas, seems set to be a good, wise king, strong and not too rapacious. I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords.
— The Guardian, London