yes. They dont want to block google or other crawlers. They still want their traffic, but they also want to get paid for getting crawled and listed.

Well I can only read English transcribed interpretations so perhaps a native German speaker can correct me.

As I understand it this is their argument:

Google crawls site X, a user visits Google News or Google Search, Google displays a page which has extracted content from site X as a link (usually the headline) and a "snippet" of what that title is referring to. Google also has advertisements on the page.

Now, as I understand their argument, The publishers claim Google makes money off someone who clicks on an advertisement on these 'constructed' pages. Google's news page is full of headlines and snippets that came from other publications. Google doesn't pay those publications, but the only "reason" that someone is reading the news page in the first place is because those headlines and snippets are on that page. Therefore Google should either share any revenue they got from the ad click with the people whose 'content' was on the page, or they should pre-pay for that content in the first place.

Does that seem like it captures it? If you agree that it does, then we can speculate that the publishers lobbying for this 'law' believe that in this economic transaction Google is getting a better deal than they are.

Except that they conveniently ignore the economic benefit they are getting from Google for telling the world that their web site has interesting content (or at least content related to the news interest or search interest of the web searcher).

Presumably these publishers make income either through sales or advertising on their web site. And those sales are proportional to the traffic at their web site. Google could charge to include them in their search/news results (and they in fact do that in search with AdWords) and would it be more or less than the papers would charge to use a snippet?

The easiest way to educate a publisher on the value of having their results appear in Google is to stop having them appear in Google. Ask any web site that was knocked off the first page by the Panda update how that feels. Those guys really "get" the value they receive by being up there. Publishers don't get that yet. (well not all of them). So Google stops indexing them. Their traffic goes back to pre-1995 levels (which means nobody goes there) and their internet costs (hosting, etc) now exceed the revenue from online advertising. Whoops! Education achieved.

Of course I could be totally off base here, there could be some moral argument I'm missing but frankly I think its all about the money here and not all of the 'value' is accounted for.

You get it right, from the parts of the debate I followed this is their main argument - "they display extracts of our texts, and people then don't visit our page but stay on Google News", which is of course unprovable.

(you could get the amount of people clicking through by stopping to list these snippets - the visitors you loose are the visitors that used to click through)

Another thing to add is: Google runs no ads on Google News, so _directly_ they don't make any money using other people's news (indirectly by binding customers etc.)

In addition: Google has no ads on the google news pages.

Well why should it be that way? If I want to get traffic to a new website I have to buy that traffic in - through ads or other mechanisms that cost money. Why should Google not charge them for the traffic they send instead? The value Google brings to the papers is far higher than the value the papers' content brings to Google.

@ChuckMcM That sounds right, but to entertain another perspective for a second, maybe the point being made is that the amount of power Google has over publishers is unhealthy. The Publishers seem to think that search engines should be fighting for their business, not the other way around. Its hard to tell what such a drastic change in the system could do, but maybe it doesn't have to be bad. I for one believe that in order to have the most accurate search results, the rankings should be based on content, not money.

Ok, lets go with that for a minute.

"Maybe the point being made is that the amount of power Google has over publishers is unhealthy."

Framing it in an adversarial way may confuse the issue. The #1 challenge for any business is getting customers. When ever a business emerges that has a large influence on customer acquisition, it annoys businesses.

Lets re-frame the debate into one from the last century. In the US the telephone company knew the address and phone number of every business in a city by virtue of providing the service. One of the ways they leveraged that is they would publish a book, called the "Yellow Pages" which listed every Company and their number. Because the information was collected into one place, the it gained economic value (information economics being an interest of mine). It had so much "value" to customers that it was the first place they looked for the phone number of a business. Businesses realized that for generic things like plumbing, locksmiths, auto repair, being at the front of the list was better than being at the end of the list. Since the list was lexicographically sorted you started seeming names like AAA Locksmith, and A1 Plumbing. Hacking the name to be at the front. Then the Phone company decided to offer up "ads" where you could place an add on the same page as the listing, now even if your name was Zlotnicks Plumbing you could put an advertisement on the first page where plumbing started. That got you business. The complaint then was "Since everyone uses the Yellow Pages, I am forced to pay high prices to get an ad in their pages just so that people will know I exist."

By that same logic businesses may end up paying search engines to appear (and they do for Shopping links according to Bing's Scroogled.com web site).

And this comment: "I for one believe that in order to have the most accurate search results, the rankings should be based on content, not money."

I can totally agree with that, but I may internalize that differently that you do. I think that giving a search engine a choice "pay us or don't crawl us" they will simply opt not to crawl. But to understand why that makes sense economically you have to think about how the information involved gets its value. In this case a collection of 99 versions of a news story for 'free' is more valuable than 100 versions of the same news story. And its worth is exactly zero for uninteresting stories.