The German war against the link
Found on Buzzmachine on Friday, 20 June 2014
Half the major publishers in Germany have started a process of arbitration — which, no doubt, will lead to suits — to demand that Google pay them for quoting from and thus linking to their content. And now we know how much they think they deserve: 11% of Google’s revenue related to their snippets.
Google is never going to pay for the right to quote and link to content. That would ruin not only its business but also the infrastructure of knowledge online.
Just turn the tables around. Google could, just for the kicks, ask those newspapers to pay up for getting linked. In the end it is not a right to be indexed; so those who don't want that (and obviously some publishers don't want to let their content get indexed) can easily be pruned from the index. Problem solved.