[shkkmo]

Let's say Google has a user on the Google News page and has a couple of levers they can pull to control if that User clicks through to read the content or only skims headlines and some snippets.

Given that there are no ads on Google News and Google makes money from most online ad sales, what reason would Google have to limit click throughs?

Clicking on am article gives Google more data and increases the chances that Google will make some money from ad sales.

Google definitely wants Google News to be the starting point for news reading habbits, but Google definitely also wants it's readers to click through and view news articles.

There are plenty of anti-competitive practices by Google to address. This simply is not one of them and arguably does more to shore up Google against competitors given that Google has a stronger ability to force publishers to grant Google access. Publishers already had full opt-out control over how Google uses their content and smaller aggregators were free to ignore those meta headers. Now smaller aggregators must convince publishers to opt-in or face legal consequences.

This law is just simply idiotic unless your only goal was to help Google News compete in Europe.