When Popplewell asked Cohen to respond to allegations that Google News infringes on copyright or “is killing the copyright of newspapers,” Cohen dismissed the allegations.

“I don't know. It would be total speculation from my part, but I think if you look at it, not just within Canada, not just in the U.S., but globally, with a handful of exceptions, these publishers are all on Google News. So I think that the vast, vast majority – we're sort of working with them in some way,” Cohen said, according to the Toronto Star.

But newspaper publishers aren't the only ones wary of their partnerships with Google, many dubbing the online giant a “frenemy.”

Google's stance that it deeply cares about copyrights is “the message it wants to get out to newspaper publishers, anyway,” Betsy Schiffman, a writer for Wired stated. “Still, we know of a few writers who might beg to differ.”

Schiffman sites the case of the Author's Guild, which has been suing Google for the past three years for copyright infringement. The Guild argues that Google Book Search drives traffic and generates revenue for Google, while at the same time “infringes copyrights, hurts writers' income potential and depreciates the value of their work,” according to Wired.

Outside of copyright issues, however, newspaper publishers also worry about Google's ability to become a direct competitor in the future, creating its own content.

When asked why Google doesn't go into content creation for itself, Cohen told Popplewell that although he can't speak of larger plans the online giant might have, “I can tell you it just hasn't been in what we're trying to do across the board in terms of the news side of it. Again it's really about helping people to find the content that's out there. We just don't see ourselves as content creators. We're more of a platform for that content.”