I didn't even know Fox owned MySpace. This is all sorts of interesting.

The buzz is about censorship, but this reinforces several ideas/themes I've been feeling. First of all there's the ham-fisted way in which the corp is dealing with "community." Perhaps they don't realize that the technology they purchased has very limited novelty. There are already open source tools that would let you build something as sophisticated as myspace at a delivered cost of under $100k.

You need to spend some money to host 43 million users, yeah, but the code isn't really very valuable. What they bought was a community. No quicker way to drive those people away than to start restricting what they can do and say.

The traditional media is woefully out of touch. The Independent calls MySpace a "filesharing" site. Ha!

Also, this casts MySpace Music in a rather different light, being owned by a global media conglomerate and all. A little less indie, you might say. It now looks more like the imprint wave of the 90s. Can we expect more of this? Maybe. Musicians are a fairly exploitable population.

Finally, I wonder if that means NewsCorp has prepared for the legal contingency families seeking civil damages as a result of statutory rape. When it's a random chat room, or something being run by a couple kids that's one thing, but if Rupert Murdoch owns a service that encourages illegal sexual encounters... well, we live in a litigious society, and Billionaire Tyrants make appealing targets.

(Found via: Atrios)