Glenn Kelman: For a week or so last month, it was very fashionable around here to mourn the death of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Bars and theaters posted "Seattle PI, RIP" on their marquees, even though to my way of thinking the PI did not so much die as resurrect itself, as one of the first newspapers to embrace an all-digital future.

Now the mob is up in arms about the clumsy, desperate efforts of two other news organizations, News Corporation and The Associated Press, to try making money in this all-digital future, by charging Google for displaying their headlines and opening paragraphs on its wildly popular portal, Google News.

In a post that TechCrunch yesterday called a "beautiful rant," Danny Sullivan compares dying news organizations' efforts to be paid for their own content to the tribute levied by Viking pirates threatening rape and pillage.

Arguing that "arrogant" traditional media are no more objective or thoughtful than blogs, Sullivan begins his essay by telling the editor of the Wall Street Journal: "Robert… shut up. Seriously, shut up."

It seems clear that we all want newspapers to die like a Mohican in a James Cooper novel -- nobly and quietly -- without realizing how much any web-based business has in common with the Mohicans.

Why can't we face the truth? Distribution technology has far outpaced the business models of many of the folks who create all the stuff on the Internet, and that newspapers are probably just the first of many victims, closely followed by books, music and television.

Google is the Viking Here (Even If It's Mostly a Nice, Good Viking)

I for one have a hard time seeing Google, the primary gateway to the entire Internet, as the victim of a Viking rape-and-pillage raid. Or a handful of old media companies who have laid off thousands despite doubling or tripling their audience -- as the Vikings.

The truth is that Google, like some sweet, oversized sixth-grader who overawes the other kids without even realizing it, shapes the entire Internet to work the way Google works: free of charge, without much personalization or registration either.

And that's a way that will never work for newspapers. The crux of Sullivan's argument is that newspapers who don't like Google can simply opt out of being included in Google's index. The conundrum, Sullivan triumphantly points out, is that newspapers can't survive on the Internet without being in the Google index. Well, it turns out that no company, not even Yahoo, can.

You Can't Opt Out of a Monopoly

But the fact that virtually no company can prosper online without Google is the very reason Google shouldn't trade on its dominance in search to dictate how it uses information from other companies.

Microsoft became the target of an anti-trust suit for attempting to use its operating-system dominance to win the browser war against Netscape. It was very popular then for folks in Silicon Valley, led in a rousing daily cheer by Sun's Scott McNealy, to rail against bundling the browser with Windows.

You could make the same argument about bundling Google search with its news portal. Control of the browser that people use to access the Web turned out to be far less meaningful than the search engine we use as the starting point for finding Web information. I switch between Safari, Explorer, Firefox and Chrome browsers all day. I never stray from Google search.

Which means I also use Google News quite a bit instead of the NYT home page, where the NYT makes almost all its money. My point is not that Google should be subject to a disastrous, wasteful anti-trust lawsuit. Or that Google should be hated for its success any more than the newspapers are now mysteriously being hated for their failure.

My point is only this: that Google's dominance in search does not give it the right to use content as it pleases, even if what Google wants, overwhelmingly, is to give consumers a free ride.

Google's First-Click Free Policy

We all love the free ride. But what most consumers don't realize is that Google has built a system that circumvents or punishes any other business model. Sites that require registration or payment to display their goods are excluded from Google's index, unless they offer Google users free access via a Google search.

This feature, called Google First-Click Free, once seemed miraculously wonderful to me, and Danny Sullivan still somehow presents it as a great gift from Google to the journalism industry.

But I'm not sure how it's a gift that I could use this feature to avoid paying the Wall Street Journal $99 a year by searching Google for each WSJ article, one at a time -- which I did for years. But then I noticed that most of my favorite WSJ writers lost their jobs and – after the NYT abandoned its own, easily skirted payment wall – another wave of layoffs washed over the Gray Lady too.

By a similar mechanism, my favorite bands have to beg you to buy t-shirts at their concerts; which is exactly what TechCrunch has proposed as the proper way for a musician to earn a living.

We could think about tip-jars for Radiohead albums or even the entire NYT -- it won't pay the bills on a large scale -- but today the people who pay are treated like suckers.

The writer of "Heroes," one of the only bona fide TV hits of the past few years, recently complained that, because of TiVo, Boxee and Hulu, television has become a "deeply flawed" way to tell a story, making money only from "the saps and dipshits who can't figure out how to watch it in a superior way."

"The Hulu Solution" Isn't a Solution

The sound of distress from the writer of a show prominently featured on Hulu tells us that Huluizing news, while a step in the right direction, isn't a panacea.

Both Sullivan and TechCrunch argue that newspapers should form a collective to compete against Google News, like Hulu has against YouTube, without acknowledging that this you-too-can-stand-up-to-Google success story is so far a failure at generating profit, even at the deeply discounted rate that Hulu pays for content from NBC and Fox.

Meanwhile, Google employees have told companies scanning YouTube for copyright violations that the scan itself is a violation of YouTube's terms of service. Yes, the newspapers believe it would be very difficult for Google News to compete as a news portal without news from newspapers; they certainly wish Google News and its brethren never existed.

But for newspapers to create their own Hulu-like news portal would be much more difficult because there are far more news organizations than there are television networks, the news organizations have far less start-up capital, news articles are far easier to copy in a fair-use way than television, and search is far more important to textual news articles than it is to television shows.

Which brings us to why newspapers are asking for a piece of the action from Google, despite having little hope of collectively putting competitive pressure on Google News: the newspapers simply have no other choice. Is that Google's problem? Why should Google care that not many other businesses, least of all a local newspaper, operate at the scale needed to make money from free content?

I'm not here to bash Google, a company I revere for coding the world's best Internet platform. Even though I am sympathetic to newspapers, I am not entirely convinced by the newspapers' claim that Google News violates fair use standards in posting snippets from news articles on its site. What's more, I have no idea how we can control the distribution of anything on the Internet and, to be honest, I don’t know what people will pay for or how it should be divided up.

But We Need to Figure Out a Way for Creative People to Make Money

But I'd like the Internet community to begin figuring out how content creators -- and not just distributors -- can profit more from their work, instead of encouraging Internet users to steal MP3s, or dancing on the graves of journalists who were too worried about reporting from Baltimore or Bosnia to build their own news search engine.

If we don't give the authors of music, film, literature and journalism a way to control the distribution of their goods, the quality of all of these creative efforts will decline.

We didn't notice it immediately, as television networks, newsrooms and record labels had enormous capital reserves for funding our free-content habit. Now those reserves are running out.

The Internet Should Be the Greatest Platform for Human Creativity

This isn't the newspaper's problem and it isn't, to answer my earlier question, Google's problem either. It's the entire technology community's problem. I think Google will be part of the solution. Danny Sullivan's essay -- hating content creators for wanting to charge for their creations -- is, with all due respect, part of the problem.

The Internet should, in theory, help the creator, by eliminating the costly means of distribution controlled by publishers and recording studios – the book, the newspaper, the cable network, the millions of DVDs and CDs stocked in Wal-Mart. The New York Times doesn't like selling ads or printing newspapers as much as gathering news anyway.

But no one can deny that Google and other technology-based distributors have so far had an effect like the publisher and the record label, making money from creative content without worrying too much if its authors survive. This is what has to end. We need to create technologies -– and a culture of respect, and an updated legal doctrine too -- that allow creative folks to make money from their own efforts.

The situation we have now is a tragedy of the commons, where free communal grazing eventually destroys the entire ecosystem. We can eat the free stuff as fast as we can, or we can figure out a way to share it that allows everyone – even those stuffy old journalists that nearly all of us still read every day -- to live long, and prosper.

[Photo credits: Zero G, Original_Ann and Mattklawitter on Flickr]

Glenn Kelman is CEO of Redfin, a venture-backed online real estate startup. You can find more of his writings here. Opinions expressed in guest posts are those of their authors, and don't necessarily reflect the views of TechFlash or its staff.