David Benigson is chief executive of media monitoring company Signal

Like most big tech firms, Google doesn’t do “sorry”, but the announcement of its Digital News Initiative is a tacit acknowledgment that they've been profiting from online news links for years without giving anything back. Yet this doesn’t resolve the issue that Google – along with companies like mine – aren’t paying for the news content on which their revenue depends.

The debate about fair remuneration for use of copyright material dates back to the dawn of the web, but it boiled over in 2011 when the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) introduced new licences for online copying. Media research company Meltwater, backed by the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), took the NLA through the British and European courts, a journey that only ended last summer with a ruling that media monitors and their clients should pay publishers when they use their content for commercial reasons.