The fight is raging most notably between Rupert Murdoch with his News Corp publishing empire and Google. Murdoch wants to charge for access to all of its online content. News Corp-owned publication The Wall Street Journal is one of the few online news sites that is successful in getting users to pay for reading content.

The Financial Times reports that Microsoft is now rumored to be in discussions with News Corp to pay the publishing giant to delist its content from Google. The talks are reportedly in very early stages according to someone close to the negotiations.

According to the report, Microsoft is approaching other large web publishers in an attempt to get them to delist content from Google as well. One publisher familiar with the plan said, "This is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins."

Google maintains that newspaper stories are not a big part of its revenues and that if the content is delisted it will not pose a big impact on the search giant. No solid details are available on the negotiations at this time, but if this attempt by Microsoft proves successful print newspapers could find a new stream of revenue to help cover the costs of generating news.

One publisher approached by Microsoft said, "[This plan] puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them."