On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Rupert Murdoch most certainly was the first media mogul to air his dissatisfaction at Google. He accused the company of "theft" and "misappropriation" of content it indexes from his news sites. Google news which has fast become the most favored destination for people looking for news, with its indexing of over 25,000 news sites and blogs . Has been accused by Murdock of indexing content and gaining traction and not paying for the content it indexes. This has been the hear of the matter. Google has now made an announcement that news publishers will be able to limit free content and decide which parts of their content the search engine needs to index . WSJ reports that "For several years, Google has allowed publishers to make individual articles that are behind a pay wall free through Google, through a service called "First Click Free." Previously, users could access an unlimited number of stories this way. Now, it will allow publishers to impose a cap...