Do you appreciate getting your news for free?

There are some who don’t think you should. They are the old school. The ones brought up in a cosy world of newspaper brands, in which readers of the Telegraph just read the Tory sheet, and had their own views on the world confirmed; readers of the Guardian enjoyed having their own opinions confirmed by the trendy lefty editorial; and readers of the NewsCorp papers had the views of Rupert Murdoch forced down their necks.

Those days are gone. Now thanks to the likes of Google News, you can jump from one paper to another as seamlessly as you can jump the hurdles in a race with no hurdles.

And you can of course enjoy the delights of columns such as this.

But the old school don’t like this idea. They would much rather it was like it used to be.

Rupert Murdoch goes to the old school.

For sometime now he has been baying at the idea of free content. He has moaned about the BBC, and its so called unfair advantage. And as for Google, well the media mogul’s views there are, shall we say, a tad unsympathetic to the Google world of free content.

There’s another company which is not unduly fond of free.  It goes by the name of Microsoft. So Linux operating systems, or free word processors from Google, probably go down with Microsoft about as well as the latest fanfare from Apple.

Talk is that Microsoft and NewsCorp are working together, that Microsoft is even offering to pay publishers to have their content removed from Google.

It really is a case of the “Empire Strikes Back.” The FT has reduced the number of free articles you can view each month, Johnson Press is planning to charge for content, and Rupert Murdoch is determined to charge for the content from his publishers.

Round one may have gone to Murdoch.

You may not know this, but you can bypass certain walls to content via Google News. So you may not be able to view an article on the FT by visiting it via the FT site unless you pay a subscription, but you can if you click on it from Google News.

Now the search engine company has agreed to end this practice.

Speaking personally, Investment and Business News rather hopes Mr Murdoch does indeed start charging for all his content. And that the rest of the newspapers follow suit. It would of course be business suicide for these publications, but it would be rather good news for this publication.