At the same time, the news industry has to be more than just Postmedia, BCE, Torstar and Rogers.

The issue is their domination of the online advertising space, not that they “steal” content from the news sources. Yes, they do get headlines, but then they direct people back to that media site to read the content. The real issue is that the ads on the social media post direct revenue to Meta/Google. The ads on the news media site send revenue to Meta/Google. They control the ads market on the buy side (people wanting to advertise) and the sell side (people wanting to show ads), and the exchanges between the two.

The big tech companies paying the big media companies for links is not the solution. It’s a stupid idea and has failed everywhere it has been tried. The real solution is to break up the ads monopolies.