But they aren't making enormous amounts of money from news content. Google News shows no ads, and never has. I've never seen an ad for a news query on search either, but can't say whether that's by policy or because nobody buys those searches. But it doesn't matter what the reason is: when there's no ad revenue, there's nothing to share.
Also, news sites have control over how their site shows up on Google. If they want to continue being indexed and show up in the search result with just a title and no snippet of the page, that's something they could make happen immediately just by themselves. That none of them are choosing to do so makes it pretty clear that the "people just read the summaries and don't click through to the article" thing isn't a problem in reality.
Yes, but they do show news along with ads on Google search results. My point isn’t that Google delivers no value but that we need to find a balance which pays for good journalism if we want healthy societies - the 20th century had local businesses paying for things like foreign reporting which kept subscribers but that clearly doesn’t work any more.
Like I said, I've never seen ads on the kinds of searches that return news. You're the one making claims about "enormous amounts of revenue" being generated by that. Have you seen ads next to news articles? Could you take a screenshot?
> we need to find a balance which pays for good journalism if we want healthy societies
Sure. Why do you think that it's search engines and social networks that should be doing the paying?
Also, news sites have control over how their site shows up on Google. If they want to continue being indexed and show up in the search result with just a title and no snippet of the page, that's something they could make happen immediately just by themselves. That none of them are choosing to do so makes it pretty clear that the "people just read the summaries and don't click through to the article" thing isn't a problem in reality.