I think the street view thing was a deliberate campaign. Many german publishers hate Google with a passion because it eats their advertisement revenue - so much that they are even lobbying for a law passed that would force Google to pay them for indexing their content.
Microsoft started photographing a few months later and no one cared.
The 'Leistungsschutzrecht'? That was really ridiculous. Publishers could simply opt-out from being indexed but of course being paid for providing snippets of content on Google News sounded like a nicer option.
Microsoft started photographing a few months later and no one cared.