Do we have any insight into why they made an exception for Google? The obvious starting point is Google threatening to stop search indexing sites they can't use in Google news - there might even be technical justification for that. But presumably the publishers would attack that as abusing a monopoly position, it seems pretty much textbook definition. They must have known signing with Google while that law existed would only make Google stronger like you said - so it'd be interesting to know why they'd do that.