Newspapers don’t need a special law to help compete with Google and Facebook
The problem is that the newspapers were already a cartel, and Google and Facebook broke them up.<p>There were several large networks:<p>Associated Press<p>United Press International<p>Reuters<p>Agence France-Presse<p>etc.<p>Newspapers generated little unique content. They tended to both act as a distributor for AP&#x2F;Reuters content, and share their content back into the network.<p>Another example... The sports, stock and weather pages? Yeah, not always generated by the paper - I worked for the NZ Metservice who had a great business gathering together the feeds and generating the layout, shipping print-ready pages direct.<p>Along come Google and Facebook who are perfectly capable of de-duping the articles from AP, allowing a winner take all competition among the papers. Add to that the ability to render the data pages themselves from feeds that they can buy and there&#x27;s a lot less of a reason for the end customer to pay the local news organisation.