How is Facebook providing the news sites a service? Did they go out to Facebook and say "please post our content on your users' feeds"? No. It's not a business

How is Facebook providing the news sites a service? Did they go out to Facebook and say "please post our content on your users' feeds"? No. It's not a business relationship between the two. Facebook users are posting the news sites' content on Facebook, which enriches Facebook and the Facebook users. Now, whether posting links is the kind of enrichment that deserves payment is a separate question. But the idea that Facebook is somehow providing news sites a service in some sort of charitable way by allowing URLs to be posted by 3rd parties is ridiculous. The equation is different for Google and search indexing, though. And of course once Google started harvesting content directly from third party websites and shoving it into answerboxes, actively siphoning traffic away, it got more complex.