I think the problem is that politicians know they should be regulating big tech, but doing so is hard. And then along comes a lobbyist from the news media with some draft legislation that's pretty easy to understand and pass. It doesn't actually solve any real problem, but it's _something_, and it allows them to be seen fighting against the bad guys that they're supposed to be fighting. Even though it means passing bad legislation

'News corporation' have been rendered pennyless since the decline of print, people dont want to pay for digital news. This has led to a global decline of standard sin journalism, they can't afford to send investigative journalists around the world, news stories are poorly researched and written.

As a society we are paying a heavy price for this stupidity

My understanding is that news corporations have been rendered penniless by Craigslist eating their rather lucrative classifieds business.

Both are true.

Their side of the case is that they want money and they have the power to get it by influencing politicians and the public.

Entitlement and very rich well connected owners

Given that news organizations have been demolished over the last decade (in part due to a collapse of ad revenue), how much do you think it is reasonable for news organizations to charge for their content? If Google shouldn't be paying to take the content and redistribute it, who should?

Personally I think there should be state funding for unbiased news so that neither the reader nor Google need to pay directly, but that's not where we are right now, all the important journalism is published by for-profit websites and it's behind paywalls. Given that, I don't think it should be surprising if a news site sees Google harvesting paragraphs from their articles and embedding them into results and goes 'hey, who said you could do that without paying for it?'

Google Search infoboxes for a person or place or other topic typically are crammed full of information that Googlebot pulled from various parts of the internet. It's really useful to have that info! But if the websites that the info was sourced from rely on ad revenue, well, Google's spider didn't click on any ads.

I don't think Google paying news sites for the privilege of indexing them is going to fix the revenue model for online news, but I also don't believe that the value of those news snippets is zero. As the article notes, their attempted solution was to switch to Headlines Only (which is what I get in the US right now), but the court objected since that was an obvious attempt to avoid paying by shipping an inferior product.

Google and Facebook have been eating such a large proportion of the ad cake for years; of course news want a larger slice! Whether it's "fair" by the rules of capitalism that they get it is up to capitalism to decide, but it's definitely fair that they stake a claim.

Ah the the massive advertising cash cow supported by journalists paid poverty wages.

Before craigslist and property listing companies like right move, local newspapers had 30-40% margins

(source a senior press officer I worked on a project with)