Can content owners fight back?

Can publishers and other content owners fight back against the power of the search engines, asks Jon Fine of Business Week.

What if 2006 is the year big media players take aim at Google's kneecaps? No, not with more lawsuits... Rather, picture this: Walt Disney, News Corp, NBC Universal, and The New York Times, in an odd tableau of unity, join together and say: "We are the founding members of the Content Consortium. Next month we launch our free, searchable Web site, which no outside search engines can access." (A simple bit of code is all it takes to bar all or some major search engines from accessing a site.) "From now on we'll make our stuff available and sell ads around it and the searches for it, but only on our terms. Who else wants to join us? Membership's free."