I think you're being a bit dramatic here. Whats the difference between this and Playstation paying for Grand Theft Auto's exclusivity, or Bing and Google paying for access to Twitter's content while small engines like DuckDuckGo go without? Or the NFL network only allowing coverage of most football games on DirecTV/Dish?
I'm not judging the business model's merits, but selling exclusive access to content is nothing new.
I'm coming at this from a completely different angle, which is entirely unfair (:P), but the big difference is that moving a closed-source, inherently-system-dependent piece of software onto another system against the will of the original developers is notably non-trivial, while ignoring a robots.txt file is a fairly straightforward exercise.
If this would-be "exclusivity" comes to pass, it won't last for very long. Even if above-board companies like Microsoft and Google continue to play by the nominal rules, something vaguely similar to the Pirate Bay is bound to pop up eventually, especially when such a massive, glaring hole in the market is present. I mean, what good is a search engine that doesn't even search properly?
A site could start blocking certain IPs and user agents as well if need be to prevent being indexed, I'm sure there's was for crawlers to get around it but a site could certainly make it hard to index there content.
Then you could start sending requests via proxies ... and sooner or later the site would start blocking legitimate users.
Either way, the majority of all new traffic comes from Google right now, and if a website has exclusivity for Bing, it would surely lose a lot visits. And it's definitely not worth it unless Microsoft pays really well for this privilege ... and I'm not sure they can do that, even if they are Microsoft.
I'm not judging the business model's merits, but selling exclusive access to content is nothing new.
I'm coming at this from a completely different angle, which is entirely unfair (:P), but the big difference is that moving a closed-source, inherently-system-dependent piece of software onto another system against the will of the original developers is notably non-trivial, while ignoring a robots.txt file is a fairly straightforward exercise.
If this would-be "exclusivity" comes to pass, it won't last for very long. Even if above-board companies like Microsoft and Google continue to play by the nominal rules, something vaguely similar to the Pirate Bay is bound to pop up eventually, especially when such a massive, glaring hole in the market is present. I mean, what good is a search engine that doesn't even search properly?