Murdoch courts trouble if he blocks Google on news

Other U.S. publishers, if they joined in, would feel more pain because they are far smaller than News Corp and depend on ad sales more than anything else, analysts said.

"It's nothing short of suicidal," Jarvis said.

Risking suicide might not seem so crazy to publishers. Many people say they face creeping death as readers drop print subscriptions and ad revenue falls.

As many deal with looming piles of debt, they must consider some radical moves after laying off thousands of workers.

"They cannot survive at the scale they are accustomed to online unless they can find a new economic model," said Tom Rosenstiel, head of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

"If it works, Google might say, 'wait a second, it's very important for us to maintain our market share of search'," he said. "Google has an interest in the news industry surviving."

CARTEL

Betting on that is risky.

"The only way such a strategy would hurt Google in our view is if all of the major newspapers and the major news sources including the AP and Reuters were to agree to a watertight cartel," Lindsay wrote in his Bernstein note.

Jarvis agreed. "It would be a mosquito bite on the elephant's butt," he said.

Also, consumers could complain about media companies choking off access to news, something that would spark ire from Congress to the White House, analysts said.

It could carry the whiff of collusion among news outlets to fix prices, something publishers fear being accused of.

"None of this sounds to me to be pro-competitive or efficient," said David Balto of the Center for American Progress, a former Federal Trade Commission policy director.

One possible outcome of News Corp threatening to drop Google could be detente: a common way for publishers to get paid for news that search engines from Google to Yahoo make available to readers, said Outsell analyst Ken Doctor.

"I don't think the endgame for anybody here is to expect that Google's going to get turned off... although you never know," he said.