[stavrus]

Your repurposed analogy isn't quite right. Google is providing a service by running around and grabbing those samples. Value is provided not only to you, the searcher, by receiving an answer to a question you posed, but to the coffee shops as well by providing them with a potential customer. Is Google not allowed to profit off of providing this value for the work they're doing?

A coffee-shop owner could argue that Google is providing enough coffee that it's disincentivizing someone like you from making a purchase, but the issue here is that Google provides tools to the coffee-shop owners to opt-out of giving those samples to potential customers. Instead of using them, the owners want to force by law that Google pays them for the samples because they still want Google to do all that leg-work of finding new customers for them. This could make it cost-prohibitive to run the service, especially as the legislation can be interpreted broadly (e.g. Google says that as written it'd be difficult for an algorithm to distinguish between news and non-news content).

I think a better analogy would be around restaurant delivery drivers. Pretend for this analogy that restaurants have a captive supply of delivery drivers that can't go off and get another job, because all the drivers know is how to drive restaurant deliveries for a living. Restaurant owners are incentivized to use the delivery drivers because it allows them to get more customers. What if the owners started asking for a law to be passed that made delivery drivers have to pay them for providing delivery service. The drivers can still make money in the end after the tips they get anyway, right?