For someone as successful as he's been, Rupert Murdoch sure has no clue what the internet is all about.

Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online. In an interview with Sky News Australia, the mogul said that newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web. In recent months, Murdoch his lieutenants have stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of "kleptomania" and acting as a "parasite" for including News Corp content in its Google News pages. But asked why News Corp executives had not chosen to simply remove their websites entirely from Google's search indexes – a simple technical operation – Murdoch said just such a move was on the cards. "I think we will, but that's when we start charging," he said. "We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it's not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story - but if you're not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form." The 78-year-old mogul's assertion, however, is not actually correct: users who click through to screened WSJ.com articles from Google searches are usually offered the full text of the story without any subscription block. It is only users who find their way to the story through the Wall Street Journal's website who are told they must subscribe before they can read further.

Murdoch also wants to legally challenge the doctrine of Fair Use. Please, please do!

Murdoch added that he did not agree with the idea that search engines fell under "fair use" rules - an argument many aggregator websites use as part of their legal justification for reproducing excerpts of news stories online. "There's a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether... but we'll take that slowly."

Of course, Murdoch will never challenge Fair Use. Media organizations live in fear of a clear judicial affirmation of Fair Use. It would make it harder for them to threaten people who engage in accepted Fair Use practices.

Still, it's amazing how little Murdoch knows about how his products interact with the internet -- that one can get full stories off of WSJ if you just know how, or that Google News doesn't actually do anything except provide a headline, part of the first sentence and a link to the source material. He actually thinks Google news is a "parasite" for linking to his products!

The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories - they just take them," he said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... they shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."

That level of ignorance of the medium is breathtaking.

With luck, Murdoch will also order Fox News to pull their stuff off Google News and enact a paywall to keep those freeloading communist conservatives from reading the material for free. It'd be the fair and balanced things to do. And I, for one, can't wait.