But this is the government paying, just with Google serving as the middle man. There's no actual economic linkage here, which means that Google's payments to th

But this is the government paying, just with Google serving as the middle man. There's no actual economic linkage here, which means that Google's payments to the news organizations are actually a tax that skips the public coffers and goes straight to the news owners. But it's no different than if the government levied a tax specifically on Google and paid the whole of that tax to the news orgs. Both approaches make an equal amount of economic sense. Personally I think it would make much more sense to raise a general corporate profit tax, and use the proceeds of that tax to pay the news. But there's a convenient devil to extract money from, so there it is.