On Friday, the news broke that Rupert Murdoch was to make good his promise of preventing aggregators from crawling his websites, by blocking NewsNow from all Times Online content.

In a statement, News International said:

"NewsNow has been using Times Online content as part of its paid-for, commercial as well as free services. They have continued to do so despite our direct requests for them to stop. As a result, we have taken the decision to disallow their indexing of our content."

Today the Guardian reported that News International has stepped things up a gear, blocking the aggregator in question from all of its websites, including Sun Online and NotW.co.uk, by changing its search engine settings via the robots.txt protocol. Although the aggregator may still potentially link to content manually, it would be risky to do so, and News International added that:

"NewsNow has acknowledged that they require our permission to use our content and, in the absence of our permission, has ceased to do so."

No further plans to block other aggregators have been reported as of yet.

Source: the Guardian