Yeah, for sure, Google wants to show the answer on the results page, and for many search queries they're able to achieve this in one way or another -- either through the knowledge graph, the question-answering slop, or in the snippets of text pulled from the search results themselves. They do, at least, show links to sources in these cases, which is better than ChatGPT (or Bard, to the extent that it's used). But I agree that there's not a lot of short-term incentive for Google to cite sources in a prominent way, and there is a lot of incentive for them to develop features that replace the websites that made them valuable in the first place. There's always been an uneasy bargain between Google and webmasters, and there's always been a tension between what's best for the Google user, best for Google, and best for the Web. If there's a similar bargain with OpenAI, I don't see them approaching it with nearly as much respect: source attribution has not been prioritized in any meaningful way.

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law"

Physical force, the ability to wipe something (or someone) out of existence, is the ultimate arbiter. Law just an upstream proxy.

It's a nitpick that's becoming increasingly relevant as we see institutions that support that proxy collapse or transform.