The tension between news orgs and Google has finally come to a head after a year of growing unease and muddled Internet copyright laws.

While Rupert Murdoch has been very vocal about wanting The Wall Street Journal and other News Corp. entities’ stories pulled from Google News, other groups like the Associated Press have been more quietly pushing for different terms of their contract with the search engine. The AP’s contract with Google News is set to expire at the end of January.

As of the time of this article, no new AP stories have appeared in Google News since December 23, which some are speculating is a power-play on Google’s part: akin to Fox threatening to pull their content from Time-Warner every time their contract expires. Except, as TechCrunch noted in an article yesterday, the deal works the opposite way on the Internet, “distribution is king, not content.”

Without all the incoming traffic that Google provides to news organizations, will media moguls relent and admit that they need the powerful search engine? Or will the AP, like Murdoch, start going to similar sites like Microsoft’s Bing out of spite for the corporate giant?

Read More: Foxy Tactics: Google News Pulls The AP’s Content As Contract Comes Up For Renewal –TechCrunch

Lesson to AP: Don’t Mess with the Google –BayNewser