This is against the background of WAN's announcement last month - it wants a more formal agreement between its news publishing members and the search engines that aggregate their content.
During the discussion on changing media models, Mr Rahnema commented that services like Google News could not exist without original content creators.
But in an unscientific but significant straw poll of the audience, only two people agreed that aggregation and search sites unacceptably exploit their content.
"Search and links are the distribution methods of the future - how is journalism going to be discovered in the future if not through links and search?" said delegate Jeff Jarvis.
"Your enemy is reality, not search. The most important thing to do it to figure out how to make this work for you."
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