So, is this [2] round one to Mr Murdoch? I don't think so. Google has announced [3] two changes to the way it treats paid-for content. Its First Click Free programme, which currently allows users to access an unlimited number of articles, will now cap the number of subscription articles readers can view at five.

For Murdoch, this is still likely to be five too many. Jeremy Clarkson's weekly column is reportedly responsible for 25 per cent of the traffic to the Times's website. Will News Corp executives really be content for Clarkson fanatics to read his ramblings for free?

Google has also announced that it will crawl, index and treat as "free" any preview pages -- usually the headline and first few lines of a story -- from subscription websites. Such stories will then be labelled as "subscription" in Google News. This is still unlikely to placate Murdoch, who has insisted that even the use of a story's headline and standfirst is tantamount to "theft". Though clearly this principle doesn't extend to the parasites, plagiarists and kleptomaniacs who run the Times's (excellent) CommentCentral blog [4].

So, despite some [5] bloggers [6] claiming Google has "caved" in to Murdoch, don't worry. It hasn't. Had Google pre-empted Murdoch's anticipated deal with Bing by offering to pay him for News Corp content, we could have justly cried, "Capitulation!" But no one at Google is contemplating such an absurd manoeuvre. Instead, by offering to compromise with Murdoch, the search engine has made itself look like the reasonable party.

Murdoch's commitment to find new revenue streams for his newspapers is in many ways admirable. We can all laugh at the proprietor of Fox News and the News of the World declaring that "quality journalism is not cheap", but the Times's permanent bureaux in Baghdad and Kabul really aren't.

Much of the industry is trying to have it both ways, mocking Murdoch's verbal assaults on free content while secretly hoping he manages to "rewrite the economics of newspapers". The truth is that it may be too late for that. Google got there first.

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