I don’t disagree with anything you just said, I also couldn’t care less about the business loss it would be for Google/Meta. But I think people’s surprise is not about that, it’s about how this business relationship was potentially actually beneficial for the Canadian news outlets who pushed for this, since a lot of their actual traffic was coming from what Google and Meta had built, whether those Canadian editors like it or not. If that’s the case, then they’re basically shutting down an effort that was providing them free advertising, potentially shooting themselves in the foot.

They also can’t claim that they wouldn’t know it would happen, since that’s what Spain did a while ago, and that’s exactly what happened. If the issue is about reusing copy, some other countries passed laws allowing Google to provide the free advertising by showing users links and titles, but without providing any summary, and Google abided. But the Canadian law here was written to ban even the parts that may be beneficial.

If you personally go straight to news websites, then yeah, there’s no loss for editors from your usage. But the thought here is that a ton of users don’t do it like you do, and the Canadian news outlets that made this law happen are about to suddenly lose all traffic from those users.