What does it mean to go out of business? Don't most newspapers make a loss? [1] (Excluding The Sun, obviously.) I don't think the motivation for funding them is profit, but influence, and so they'll continue to be produced for quite a while.

Regarding Google, didn't Murdoch complain about just that? [2]

[1] Well, at least The Times and The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/20/times-paywall-re... mentions a daily loss of £240,000 for The Times, and http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/10/guardian-media-g... suggests similar (if not as great) losses by The Guardian. http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/tim-de-lisle/ca... suggests a calculation of £100,000 a day. However, The Telegraph appears to make a profit, as suggested here because of merging their digital and print media: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/18/telegraph-group-... — though I get the feeling that it would still be funded somewhat past the point of profitability too…

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/07/rupert-murdoch-g...

Good point.

However, I think even Mr Murdoch's personal wealth could not sustain the losses of digital news outlets should Google comply and stop indexing them. By any means, they just have to put a little piece of text in their robots file to do just that - so this is yet more talk in favor of strong copyrights, and no action to renew anything.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/robots.txt would suggest that they are already doing that for their paywalled sites, wouldn't it?