LONDON – Google said on Tuesday, in response to threats by Rupert Murdoch to ban the search engine from listing content from his news empire, that any company could ask to have stories taken off.

In an interview in his native Australia, Murdoch accused Google of stealing stories from News Corp. newspapers for the Google News service, and said he might ban them once he introduces charges for the papers' online editions.

Google said it was up to individual news organizations to decide whether they wanted their stories listed on Google News, and there were "simple technical standards" that would remove them if they wished.

"News organisations are in complete control over whether and how much of their content appears in search results," it said said in a statement issued in London.

"Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don't."

It added: "If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do it tell us."

Google said its news listings service and web searches were a "tremendous source of promotion" for news organisations, sending them "about 100,000 clicks every minute".

It added that Google News's approach was "fully consistent with copyright law", as it only showed the headline, short snippet of the story and a link to the publishers' site where readers could read the full version.

News Corp owns an enormous number of newspapers around the world including The Australian, the New York Post and The Times of London, and is planning to soon charge all its online readers.

Murdoch has accused Google of stealing from his News Corp. empire, and warned he may block the search engine from accessing its content.

"People who simply just pick up everything and run with it, steal our stories -- we say they steal our stories, they just take them without payment," Murdoch told Sky News in a weekend interview here.

"That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... they shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."

Speaking specifically about Google, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp. said he was considering banning the search engine from listing his company's content "when we start charging."

The user-pays model is already in place at News Corp's Wall Street Journal, where readers can only access full content as a paying subscriber. "It costs us a lot of money to put together good newspapers and good content," Murdoch said as he defended the planned move.

Nevertheless, Murdoch said last week that his plans to begin charging all News Corp's online readers by June could be delayed.

"It's a work in progress and there's a huge amount of work going on not just with our sites but with other people," Murdoch told reporters in the United States.

In his interview with Sky News, Murdoch also flagged a legal challenge to the "fair use" doctrine, which search engines use as justification for the reproduction of news stories.

However he indicated this challenge would not happen soon, saying: "we'll take that slowly".