While this is all very shady, it also seems to be a poor long-term business decision for Google.

"Our revenue and profits have dropped accordingly,which has forced me to cut our staff down to a bare bones team ... the quality of our content and product have dropped"

If CNW is no longer able provide that data because of financial insolvency, then Google no longer has a source they can scrape. This smells like the poor short-term incentives that drive individual roles instead of simply unethical behavior on Google's part.