Diller, the CEO of IAC, which owns The Daily Beast, said that he hopes that "the DNA" of The Daily Beast will infuse Newsweek. He added that Newsweek's former owners had been looking for an Internet-based entity to buy it. "The manager of the Washington Post [Newsweek's owner] believed [Newsweek was going to be sold to an Internet company," Diller said. "The only way to survive print was to take this infrastructure of the Internet and meld it into a print property." Diller said that in six to eight months, he'd know if "this experiment" of the Daily Beast-Newsweek merger would work.
But when asked about Rupert Murdoch's The Daily, Diller pulled no punches. "I find it amazing that they put out a product called The Daily and promoted it enormously and it's impossible to download," he said. "To me, that's a gating issue." Diller said he had no plans for a similar, iPad-only product. "I don't know why you'd do an original product only for anything," he said.
Diller also broached the subject of net neutrality, of which he is a big proponent. Diller says he believes it is fair for Internet providers to charge extra for extra usage, "like electricity," but that those cable and telecom companies shouldn't be able to control access to various sites. Said Diller: "We need an unambiguous rule of law that no one will step between the publisher and the consumer. Full stop."