Equality really wasn’t what the german publishers had in mind. They wanted Google to pay for being able to show a snippet of their content in News. A ridiculous idea, that was countered by the only sensible answer: Google asked publishers if they wanted to continue to have their content listed in Google News for free or if their content should be removed. Needless to say that almost all of the proponents, including the most vocal publishers, agreed to keep their content indexed, thereby rendering the law useless.
That’s how it worked in practice.
