The real Hardball isn't the game show on MSNBC, where politicians lie and yap at one another.

It's something far more serious, played every day, by huge corporations that masquerade as guardians of the public interest, but are in fact as corrupt as the rest of us. (That's LA Times founder Harrison Gray Otis on the right. More about Harry Otis here, near the bottom of the page. I direct David Shaw's attention to the quote from Theodore Roosevelt.)

The prerogatives of these corporations and their hirelings, who call themselves journalists (then deny this status to you and me) is under threat on this medium as never before. They're scared, and they're playing Hardball.

Their right, earned by corporate might, to define what is and what isn't news, what is and what isn't fair comment, is under threat, right here, right now.

And they don't like it one bit.

The game is being played mainly on three search engines. On MSN note how these corporations are given, not dominance, but exclusivity. The same is true on Yahoo. Note the list of "resources" at the top-right of the Yahoo page. Note too the prominence given one outfit's stories, the newspaper co-op called AP.

In both cases what you see on your screen is the result of business negotiation. News value is determined by people, meeting in rooms, and (perhaps) money changes hands (we're not told).

Is this fair? It may well be. It's certainly business as usual. And -- here is the key point -- the process is completely opaque.

On the other hand, we have Google News. What you see here looks similar but it is, in fact, quite different. While the stories of the giants do get prominent play, so do other organizations, and other types of news coverage.

At 11:15 AM for instance I checked Google's "coverage" of Laura Bush's trip to Afghanistan, sorted by relevance. Position four was held by a right-wing group, the Conservative Voice. Position seven was held by a left-wing site, Counter Currents, posting a blog item from Counterpunch.

The results on all stories change moment-to-moment, and only a small part of what we call the blogosphere is represented, but the fact is that Google News is offering a far wider set of sources than its rivals. These include "official" outlets like Voice of America and Pravda. They include newspaper sites requiring registration. They also include many sites from outside the U.S.

In some cases, they even include blogs. Yes, even this one.

But that's not the full extent of Google's challenge to the news industry.

That's because you, the user, can fully customize all this, and fairly anonymously. All you need to create a custom news view on Google is a cookie -- there's no registration required. (You may recognize the gentleman to the left here as the owner of UPI.)

I can't offer you a link to my own Google News page, but I will tell you it features topics of specific interest to me -- AlwaysOn, Cellular phones, even my old alma mater, Rice University.

And as you drill down, as you seek more obscure keywords or go through multiple pages of stories, you will even find stuff I wrote.

In the last few days here I have registered several objections to Google News, and made some specific complaints. But the fact remains that Google is, to date, the only search engine that has made any effort to go beyond the corporate veil in offering "news" to its users.

And this is what the corporate veil can't stand.

This is precisely why, I feel, organizations like AP, Kyodo and (most notoriously) Agence France-Presse have gone after Google News with their lawyers. They don't want the competition.

You will note, if you use Google News today, that not only are there no indirect links to Agence France-Presse stories (a major technical feat), but there are no direct links to AP stories, either. On the other hand, you will find AP all over Yahoo.

Has money changed hands? Has Yahoo sold out its definition of "news" and paid money to allow a near-monopoly by AP?

You don't know. I don't know. We're not told.

That's opaque.

By contrast the situation at Google is, right now, fairly translucent. There's no standards manual I can read. I'm told, for instance, that this story will appear there, in time, but what prominence will it be given? How might we at Corante bring it to greater prominence? We don't know.

I think that if Google News were fully transparent it would face a wholesale boycott by corporate media, which would leave its news page looking very different than it does. (The publisher at the right is allegedly trying to take over the local news business.)

But in the battle to re-define news based on what people want to read, rather than based on what corporations think is good for them, Google News remains the leading edge.

Yahoo and Microsoft have sold you down the river by contrast, and they are selling you a bill of goods.