News Corp agrees deal with Google over payments for journalism

>The deal likely marks the death of a proposal from the Australian government to force Google and Facebook to enter arbitration with Australian media companies forcing them to pay for not only excerpts of news articles, but also simple links to news websites. A number of major backers of the plan, including TV networks Seven and Nine, have agreed to be featured in Google’s News Showcase over the past week. With News Corp now signing its own deal, only a few Australian media companies remain as holdouts, including Australian Community Media, publisher of a number of regional titles, and Guardian Australia.

I have read several articles in various publications about this, and I still don't understand it. Perhaps I'm being incredibly dense.

What exactly is Google paying for? The right to index news content? Sure, Google benefits from indexing quality information. But to force them by law to pay to index seems more like a parody of rent seeking behavior than something I would expect to happen in real life.

How is Google "stealing revenue" by showing me links to news articles? I still have to open the links to read the content, at which point I can be paywalled or shown ads.

Has my brain been melted by exposure to technology? I truly don't see what's controversial about this. It seems so absurd that I wonder if I'm misunderstanding something essential to the story. I don't even see what the harm is to the news service? That they didn't get ad revenue from running a search engine?