Once they have your attention, then they can sell ads.
Google News is an attention winning product, and it feeds into their broader ad ecosystem even if they don’t monetize it today.
And the French law applies to all companies in Google's position, not just to Google. So the there's still nowhere better than Google for users to go.
The only losers in this deal are the French news agencies, and perhaps French users if you consider them worse off for not finding French news sources.
So French users go to French media sites. I'm not really seeing the big loser here beyond Google, which is exactly why they've fought this so hard and for so long (despite, by your take, making no money on it).
That's not true. The entire reason Google hosts these "snippets" on their search results page is to keep users on that page and not clicking through to other sites. With this they lose that ability.
You're talking as if Google News is the only affected site here. It isn't: the vast majority of this traffic is on search results pages. Which Google does make vast amounts of money from.
I don't think this is the case for search or news. The "snippets" under a search result make me more likely to click through and really don't ever provide enough info to allow me to skip reading the page.
Since your assertion runs counter to my (and others) experience, I hope you have some actual data to back this up? Perhaps a website that added a robots.txt to prevent snippet collection and saw an improvement in traffic from search?
So Google gets to advance the dominance of AMP, gets to track user behavior and does make money from Google News. If it didn't really have any value to Google and advance their agenda, it would be shutdown.
https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/#supported-a...
This is a remarkably naive take.
If Google provides a service, they make money off it.
In 2008, during one of the many legal battles Google has waged over Google News, Google estimated that they made $100M off of people using Google to access news. Clearly that number would be some factor larger now. Because the more people who rely upon Google for a service, the less they end up elsewhere. The more Google controls your eyeballs and is likely to capture your ad clicks.
It's the same reason Google scrapes the web and provides the top answer in their answer bubble. It's "free" and it also robs viewers from ever going to the sites actually providing the information.
Or do you think Google puts all of that engineering effort, endless lobbying and legal fights with the news community...because they're just so benevolent?
Even ignoring the captured attention, this also enables Google to prioritize news sources that are more Google friendly (e.g. use Google ad networks), and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.
If that's the case, then they must believe the snippets send more people to news websites than they otherwise would?
Google loses literally nothing.
Google doesn't make any money off Google news. They make money sending traffic to advertisers, not to news sites. And the Google news page doesn't run ads. It's just a free service.
The only benefit to Google is that it makes their brand better.
This has been the irony all along; Google's been running a 100% free (NOT ad supported) service to help users find news sites, and the news sites demand to be compensated. So OF COURSE this is going to be the response; there was never any money to share.