- Google had to exclude the plaintiffs or shut down the service because they were not allowed to operate it without a license, and could not get a license in time;
- Deprived of Google traffic, the News site audience suddenly dropped and they granted Google a free license, as an emergency process to keep the lights on;
- Google keeps that free license for all sites, every other operator simply doesn’t have the capacity to reach out to every site, so competition to Google is completely killed.
The worst part of all this? There is a very old convention, well enforced, that already handles it: robots.txt
No idea how it'll work out.
If I understand correctly, which way this goes is completely at Google's discretion. And Google hasn't shown inclination to cooperate with such schemes in the past...
On the other hand, I think companies like Google and Facebook are FAR too large and powerful and I think the only way to deal with that is by making the Web less good at what it does.