Google could simply remove them from their index for a week, see if a 25% decrease in traffic for a month will make them think twice.
I bet that they would change their tune by the the 3rd day and beg google to re-add them.
EDIT: Also as someone said further down, google could even charge for their indexing of the news, IMO they are providing a service to the news companies.
In theory this is akin to holding someone hostage, but isnt this what the media companies want? I doubt google would ever pay to license the links so the only other option would be to omit them...
> Should Google be able to do that without consequence?
What consequence should there be?
> I guess they don't because we would go over to Bing.
I'll bet that they wouldn't lose much search share and would lose even less search revenue if they ignored a huge fraction of the supposed "news sources". (1) News search isn't huge or lucrative. (2) Most news is "commodity", so it doesn't really matter where you get it from.
Cheap distribution (read internet) has put all the commidity news folks in competition with each other, driving prices down. A lot of journalists haven't figured out how that applies to them.
Note that Craigslist demonstrated that a huge fraction of newspaper subscribers/buyers weren't buying the paper for the news, but for the ads.
I bet that they would change their tune by the the 3rd day and beg google to re-add them.
EDIT: Also as someone said further down, google could even charge for their indexing of the news, IMO they are providing a service to the news companies.