So then obviously CNN should never write an article again and isn't a profitable business...

That is complete and utter nonsense. Linking itself adds value - see the uproar with Facebook getting rid of news in the feed. If the publishers genuinely felt as you do, they would simply prevent content being linked to by Google News/etc. Instead they want to demand payment for it, and force the behavior instead of letting Google choose cheaper news sources to link to.

That's why we have so much clickbait.

Hmm... so maybe it's not all bad? If it gets rid of clickbait ;)

If a single publisher chooses to do that, they only hurt themselves, Google is far too big.

If it's forced for all publishers, it might actually have an effect.

Then why pass a law? If what you say is true, the publishers could enter alliances with each other and block Google with robots.txt until Google agrees to pay. I believe the answer is that some MEPs don't really care if it "works" or not, because they can blame Google when Google blocks traffic. They want to be seen as standing up to American tech companies.

That's one of the reasons I frequent this site, so I don't have to wade through dozen bad homepages laden with adds to find interesting articles.

And it is also why I used RSS in the past but I wonder how that will be handled.

So here the BBC derives benefit, but doesn't fall under the regulations if there aren't clickable links?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs/the_papers