[timwaagh]

It may be counterproductive but in a way those publishers always held the rights to their own work. Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. But maybe that should be opt out, rather than opt in. I expect most of them to request Google to use snippets again before very long in any case.

[zmix]

> Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to.

They were!

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

  <meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." /> 
  These meta tags control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing.
  
  nosnippet - Don't show a text snippet or video preview from being shown in 
  the search results. For video, a static image will be shown instead, if 
  possible. Example: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">
  
  max-snippet:[number] - Limit the text snippet length for this page to [number] 
  characters; specify 0 for no snippet or -1 to allow any snippet length.

[realusername]

They already can, they just leave the meta tags with an empty string and nothing will show up.

[kozhevnikov]

It should be a simple robots.txt setting (i.e. indexed but without snippets) available to any publisher and content creator in any country.

[zmix]

It is already. And in addition to that, since 'robots.txt' is being considered to broad and too 'out of time', Google offers meta tags, that their bot evaluates. They did this long time before the EU direction.

[dahauns]

But there already is? That's exactly what the

  nosnippet

meta-tag is for.