Affecting Google’s indexes

When I first read this Mashable post on Rupert Murdoch wanting pulling his online properties from Google’s indexes I immediately went on the defensive, laughing at how these old media guys don’t get the Internet.
But being the devil’s advocate that I am, I played devil’s advocate to my own opinion. Who’s to say you can’t pull your site from Google’s indexes? Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. I mean, in order for Google to ignore your site content, it’s just a matter of changing a META tag in your source code to say “NOFOLLOW”.
So I was both pissed at Murdoch for having the audacity to suggest pulling his properties from Google results and simultaneously exciting that someone was (thinking of) going up against a company that is making it’s way into more and more aspects of our lives and finding it increasingly hard to stay true to their ‘do no evil‘ matra.
Now it’s great if you have the balls to suggest making your content un-indexable, but you better have an amazing fucking plan in place to maintain relevance and profitability. NBC, CBS, Fox and other TV networks were able to pull their content from Youtube by banding together and forming Hulu. Perhaps the news media will do something similar.
…but part of Murdoch’s closing of the Google Juice hose also involves charging for content.
Good luck with that.