The material itself belongs to you. The servers it is hosted on belong to Google. You are free to access public domain material and do what you want with it, but Google has every right to limit how you access their servers.
But the original work is still public domain. So if you can find a copy somewhere else, you don't have to pay for Google's copy or follow their rules.
I don't like this argument, not one bit.
Publishers presumably have had copies of all public domain books since they've been printed. Does that mean the publisher should be compelled to print a copy and give it away to anyone who asks? Even if they send an automated request for one 1000 times a second?
Google's the one making the claim that publishers should do the work and not benefit from doing that work, so why can't I benefit from Google's efforts as well?
If I have a book in my house and you want to cite text from it, you can't cite Fair Use to break into my house and look at it.
If I did, though, you'd charge me with breaking in, not with stealing.
Google's not claiming you don't have a right to reuse the text. They're placing restrictions on how you use their service to access that information. It's no more a copyright claim than your local library telling you that you have to come during their operating hours.
Maybe Comcast only works from 9-5 anyway. It's their service. It'd be like a highway charging you different amounts depending on what time of day you traveled.
I'm not quite sure what the parallel's are to Google Books though... (I think we've gone too far down the metaphor rabbit hole)
Google's (and other Internet services providers) terms of service restricting your usage aren't anti-competitive in nature. The restrictions they're placing on your usage of the content don't prevent you from getting that same content from another provider (especially when we're talking about public domain or fair use text.)
Carriers are regulated much more heavily than other businesses, because the nature of their business creates a disproportionate number of opportunities for anti-competitive practices and other shenanigans. Also, many of them have a monopoly or duopoly position in their marketplace, and as such are scrutinized more closely for anti-competitive practices.
Example: As a monopoly cable provider I can be the dominant internet provider in your city. So to extract more money from users, I create a new subsidiary owned by the same (unregulated) parent company as the cable division that charges for online video. The parent company then tells the cable company to throttle the bandwidth for all competitors so that everyone is forced to move to that new company's video service, regardless of whether it's actually a better product. This is anti-competitive and harmful to the public - rather than offering a better service, I'm using my ownership of one business to unfairly hamper free competition in another market.
Rain falls down from the sky. It goes through a river. The river passes through Glen Hollander's land before it ends up in your backyard. Glen realizes this, and puts up a dam to prevent the water from reaching you, unless you pay a monthly fee.
You may not like it, but the internet is the rain, and it's flowing through Comcast's land before it gets to your back yard. You can always try to find a different landowner to sell you water if you don't like it, but ain't no "argument" that's gonna change where the rain falls. (Unless you start your own ILEC and dig your own fiber)
In the actual U.S. it is entirely probable that Glen would be made to get rid of the dam instead of cutting off water supply to the rest of the county, for the same underlying common-sense principles that have caused things like easements to end up in property law.
Even if the internet 'needed' to be used, the only easement you could claim would be on the equipment of the telco in order to access something over the telco's property [that you could not otherwise access]. There are multiple methods to gain internet access, and the internet is not a requirement of a property or method of access (unless telephones and postal mail become abolished), and does not affect your property.
I don't see what any of this has to do with political philosophy. The law is the law; doesn't much matter what you label it.
What if Glen tricked everyone into not building dams of their own, because Glen promised to let other people use his water too, but then didn't actually honor his promise?