At industry events publishers fume about the broken bargain with Google, which historically scraped and copied their entire websites at no charge in exchange for sending them substantial amounts of traffic. Now that referral traffic is drying up. At events most agree that publishers must unite to strike a new collective bargain with Google based on a universally applied fair payment for content model. But privately many are signing secret deals with Google that provide them with cash and (a little) referral traffic in the short-term.
Source: The prisoner’s dilemma: Why UK publishers are signing Google AI deals