The justification for the remuneration agreement would seem to me to be that each individual news outlet is worth nothing, or very close to nothing, to Google.

The justification for the remuneration agreement would seem to me to be that each individual news outlet is worth nothing, or very close to nothing, to Google. What provides value to Google is having quality search results about a particular topic in the native language. This is satisfied by some portion of news outlets allowing themselves to be indexed, foreign news sources, and independent sources (i.e. blogs and Twitter). And my suspicion is that the value to Google is likely inversely proportional to the size of the news source, and I think the smaller publishers are hurting the most. I care to some degree that the NYT shows up in Google (but not much, really) whereas I couldn't care in the least about whether a local news paper in West Virginia is indexed.