Tim Berners-Lee on the Right to Link .... from way back as 1997
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 4:19PM Myths are dispelled in this quite revealing piece of internet history started by Tim Berners-Lee in 1997. It puts the current debates in perspective.
We tend to forget that search engines - which are what enable us to find interesting web content that we might want to link to in the first place - predate the internet as we know it today . Search engines have evolved in DNA-like fashion from the days of lists maintained by people like Tim Berners-Lee on CERN, to early programs like Archie, the first search program written by a student and Gopher (1991, even I remember that, I hate to admit!) to all the variants we now know today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
What the newspapers are doing is tantamount to blocking the lifeblood of the Internet. It is like deliberately introducing thrombosis in an otherwise healthy organism.