Murdoch Says Web Aggregators Should Pay for Content

If his company is the only content provider that will block the search engines, he will lose big. However, if he can convince several other big content providers that they all should block the search engines as well, he gets more bargaining power towards the search engines and could eventually make them pay up.

From Murdoch's point of view, he has nothing to lose on this. It doesn't cost him anything to lash out like this, except making a lot of nerds like us angry, but we're pretty insignificant. And if he succeeds, either by getting a lot of content locked up behind payment walls, or by securing exclusivity deals with certain search engines, he gains money. If he doesn't succeed, he didn't lose anything, so trying it is a perfectly valid business decision.