What's stopping Google from refusing to pay the news sites, thus de-indexing them from Google entirely? If the relationship is "pay me for my content", then refusing to serve links to their media is absolutely within their rights.
As the article states, this is the exact thing that happened in Spain and Germany, with the result being that the major publishers folded. Which is an argument that "make google pay" idea is futile and doomed from the beginning; the publishers can't make google pay simply because they need google far more than google needs them.
The analogy is quite difficult. A television station is a well defined legal and technical object with a licensing regime, a standardized image format etc. A cable network is, by definition a transmission infrastructure designed to carry a number of such signals.
A "news website" and "news agregator" are... what exactly? Since search traffic is so valuable, publishers would modify their sites readily to fall just under the legal threshold for news sites in order to get picked up by Google's non-aggregator of non-news sites. It's virtually impossible to craft definitions that are simultaneously not trivial to circumvent by Google and also have no impact on established, unrelated internet content.
What's stopping Google is that they would lose out on advertising revenue, and drive users to other search engines which do serve links to news media sites.
In practice, people trust Google more than hey trust the news site. Google News in Spain was shut down in 2014. Google dominates search engine market share in Spain today and for every period from 2014 to 2018.
Only the publishers have something to lose here.