We don’t know how this plays out yet. This first step was quite predictable, but its effects on the overall news media landscape will take months to unwind. Will this increase the ad revenue for news sites because of increased clickthrough rates? Will it push them towards obscurity because their reporting is less available? Will it make no meaningful difference whatsoever?
Google did the same thing in Germany after a similar national version was introduced. News sites quickly noticed a significant decrease in visitors coming from Google. They then attempted to sue Google to force them to list results with snippets AND also pay for it. Courts quickly ruled against that, so news sites just decided to allow Google to list the full results again.
The end result is that the law meant to work against Google actually benefited them. News sites cannot afford to not give Google a free license, but smaller search engines face a big issue.
There was no effect on the consumer who uses google as the law was supposed to be installed August 1st 2013 but the main publishers who lobbied for the law granted google a free license 2 days before the deadline.
As far as I know google is now the only search engine who has this free license.
It's quite funny because those publishers advertised the law with some heavy criticism towards google. The whole thing was some kind of "anti-google-law". In the end they made them stronger as other portals and search engines have not been granted a free license. I always wondered if this whole thing was not intended this way to give them a better standing on google news in the end.
The EU could have learned something here just like the lobby who pushed for it again.
I'd assume the result for those who do not use google to look for news will find smaller "news" sites. Especially those who feed them fake news because every serious news site has their license rights protected by the VG Wort.
Axel Springer AG (who were the primary lobbyist for the law) actually attempted to use the law against Google in late 2014 for four of their biggest sites. It took two weeks for them to give Google a free license again. They cited a 40% loss of clicks from Google and a 80% loss from Google News as the reason.
