The sites always had an opt-out of being scraped, via robots.txt. Google made a special-case change for French news sites where they stopped showing snippets, a

The sites always had an opt-out of being scraped, via robots.txt. Google made a special-case change for French news sites where they stopped showing snippets, and just showed URLs (still opt-outable via robots.txt). The complaint was just a pretext to force Google to pay protection money against the spirit of the law, as if France is some failed-state thug-government like Libya or something.