The original article put it as follows:

When asked by PC Pro if Google should be paying newspapers for their content, the Guardian Group’s director of digital strategy and development, Simon Waldman replied: “Yes. Marissa Mayer at Google has said that Google News is worth $100m to them in referrals alone, and that is before they have started their recent attempts to monetise it. I think it is only fair that some of that value is shared with the content creators who allow the product to exist in the first case.”

I can’t see any advertising on the Google News pages.

Clearly Google is now an advertiser and that has to make you question its priorities – indeed Google was created specifically to avoid mixing advertising and search.

However it clearly isn’t only an advertiser (and it’s never pretended to provide content). The fact is that Google’s position is dependent on it offering the best search and returning those relevant hits in a fraction of a second demands infrastructure which requires a lot of money. If someone does it better Google will disappear very quickly (remember Altavista?)

I also don’t think “parasitical” is right. To begin with anyone can edit their robots.txt to remove themselves from Google.

The fact is the web business model requires traffic and Google is the best provider of it. Without Google even the big name sites wouldn’t have the traffic needed to generate the advertising revenue necessary to pay for their content . And with its AdSense program Google even directly provides the ad revenue necessary to keep small sites going.

That still leaves huge problems for the mid-range sites adapting from print to web – I’m not castigating them; I work for one – but it’s not a problem that Google has created or can solve.

The majority of Google’s activity is now purely “parasitic” in that when I search for “The History of Widgets” I am presented with all kinds of “purchasing opportunities” by Google, only a few of which bear any relation to “Widgets”, and fewer still to their history. Of course I can scroll down a few pages to find genuine information, but that’s not really the point. Indeed the ASA might take an interest in a “Search” engine which returns results that are unrelated to the terms of the search.

Even if we ignore my irritation at these false pretenses, even Google needs to be aware that like all parasites, to prosper it needs to maintain the existence of the host. If all those terrible old-fashioned media outlets which you implicitly castigate fail, then Google’s “News” portal (and all its associated revenue) will fail. Google provides absolutely NO original content in any of its “services” it exists only becuase others do.