Content Owners to Charge Royalties for Searching?

dwarfking writes in with a story that follows up on the impact of recent Google events: "Ok, maybe I'm a little dense here, but isn't this plan more of an impact to the content provider than to the search engines. From the article: 'In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty.' So, ok, a search engine company decides it doesn't want to pay royalties and therefore doesn't index the provider's site. Now won't the provider actually lose readers since their articles won't be locatable by search anymore?"

Hey! I got a better idea

[iminplaya]

Let's just shut down the net. Damn thing has been nothing but trouble since the beginning. We probably should outlaw all communications that don't provide more income for the content "owners". That means no more printing, writing, singing, painting, talking...anything. If we don't want to give all our money to these damn people, we should shut the hell up, right?

And put in your earplugs
put on your eyeshades
you know where to put the cork...

Oops, there goes another violation.