Sure, and I would welcome that. But I think smaller publishers (including bloggers) might have problems, too. The law would apply to their blogs as well, they would have to figure out how to allow Google and others to still quote them. It might be so complicated that it would cause a lot of blogs to shut down.

Other news processors were already mentioned in the article. I just fear that it would make it too costly to experiment and would kill small publishers.

Would it work to just put your blog under a permissive distribution license (Creative Commons or the like)? I know nothing about the German legal system or the exact phrasing of this law; could someone with more domain knowledge comment on how this would interact with licensing terms?

I don't know the exact phrasing either. Also not sure if everybody wants to put their content under CC.

I think the government could make this messy enough to even foil the CC plan. For example they could set it up like GEMA for music - there would be an entity distributing the money and collecting it on behalf of the content providers. Besides, is there a standard way yet to announce CC content? That would be necessary to make it work for search engines.

AFAIK this is the way to go: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_works

And then when your blog quotes or links to some other site (let's face it, a huge amount of blogging is discussion of news stories ...)? - they can't put that under CC and they might even be asked to pay for the privilege of linking to the story - they basically get hit both ways.

Blogs and smaller such institutions could license their headline and snipper 'content' for a nice fee of $0.

The question is, how do you license it? What if licensing it costs a government fee of 10000$ for the bureaucracy?