[Symmetry]

Looking at the text of the ruling, I can see how someone might interpret it either way, either as having to eliminate the links they have "cached" or the links to a "cached" version of the website. I think that if I was a legal counsel to Google I would probably advise them not to do any linking at all in the face of that ambiguity and the large penalties for violating the court order.

Equally important, I'm having a hard time imagining how it would be reasonably possible for Google to only link to the articles. A hyperlink is a combination of both text and the link, and the text has to come from somewhere. Usually it is the title of the web page that is linked to, but then Google would still be stealing content from the newspapers. I suppose they could just use the URL itself as the text of the hyperlink, but then we get to the second part of this issue. Complying with the order and still providing links would require rewriting a lot of Google's front end code just for this one specific case. Given that Google already has a process to block sites entirely at the back end it would be a lot easier to just comply with the court order that way, and probably the only way that they could do it quickly enough.