And poof: There goes News Corporation. Well, almost.

Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide news empire is teetering on the edge of inevitable irrelevancy these days, threatening to withdraw its pages from SERPs – to which Google has said “Be our guest” – and laying out preliminary plans to start charging for content across the board. That means paying for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in America, and 33 different periodicals (including The Sun, The Times, and The Australian) in English speaking countries around the world.

A pretty tall task, but it actually wouldn’t be that difficult. All Murdoch would need to do would be to put a short, little text request into his code and his enterprise could disappear from Google forever. The challenge then would be twofold.

First, News Corp would have to find a way to maintain the steady flow of traffic they currently experience in part because sites like wsj.com and the Daily Telegraph in Australia currently have a strong presence on Google news searches.

Second, Murdoch would have to find a way to convince all those who get to his sites to fill out all the necessary forms and pay up for something that’s free only a few clicks of the mouse over.

Mr. Murdoch has obviously proven himself a pretty fluid businessman over the years, but something about this screams out-of-touch. Murdoch has the right idea that there will come a day when the general public will need to pay for their news, but it looks like the Aussie’s jumping the gun. Yes, 78-year-olds like him still enjoy picking up the paper every day, but, as Gawker explains, news is picked up these days by “stick[ing] a hot, throbbing search query into Google.” All the cool kids are doing it these days.