Mention natural resources and most people think of oil, gas, iron, and so on. I think that news can now be added to that list, and what makes news a natural resource is, simply, the internet.

Reuters is going to be taken over. This nugget of news is dug out by some kid at the coal-face; others add value by commenting, whether wisely or otherwise (oddly, a comment that the readers agree with is far more valuable than one with real insight); and then the vein is exhausted, and the world moves on.

Being first with the news is much more of an advantage now than it ever was in the heyday of the printed tabloids. They went to huge trouble to conceal their front page scoops from rival eyes, but the second edition of all their rivals always carried that exclusive (it still works like that) and most of the rest of the content was identical (and still is).

On the web, however, if you can get your links in, you can get huge traffic from a genuine scoop. You don’t have to have subscribers to draw them in, and you do get paid for it – per eyeball.

In media, the original natural resource was “quality content” – the ability to create The X-Files or Buffy The Vampire Slayer or House. Increasingly, controlling that natural resource is like trying to stop the rain falling on the farm next door. Within minutes of a good programme being broadcast, Mininova has it on a torrent. Why would I pay Virgin £90 a month to get all its channels when I can download an HD version, without adverts, in an hour or so?

Any alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo can be seen as an attempt to capture that rainfall. If you can’t stop it falling on the Google farm, next best is to make sure your farm has more acres.

If this is Microsoft’s plan, it is doomed to failure because it goes against its instinct for control. This has driven all its effort and innovation in the area of digital rights management, which ultimately aim to restrict the number of people who can share the natural resource.

The winners in this new media age will be those who can distribute more copies of popular content in the first half hour and who can target their content. The losers will be those who try to own it, restrict viewers and charge per download – that won’t work because nothing is that good, not even Buffy.