They already "pay money" to develop and maintain it, you think it has zero value for them? It is a loss leader to keep you stuck on the Google brand and make Go

They already "pay money" to develop and maintain it, you think it has zero value for them? It is a loss leader to keep you stuck on the Google brand and make Google the default for every type of search. That has enormous value. And this probably applies to Google search as well. They will just simply fight this until it goes away, because it will have implications for all other content, because why would news be special? What about blogs? What about any other original content? But I think this could be bad for competition too. How can someone enter the market for search if you have to jump through so many hoops? Google will try to work a deal that works well for them and tries to lock out competition as well by making the startup cost high. My hope is that it ends up forcing them to be more friendly to publishers in how they send them traffic and how they appropriate their content. But I don't think money should change hands to let them use the content.