The problem with all of these laws is the lack of integrity in the underlying logic. The laws are written because ad revenue is no longer supporting news. But the laws are written as if somehow this is connected to social media and search linking to news media content. It just isn't. You can take away all the news media content (as Facebook is) and you will still have no ad business left for news media. The ads are going where the eyeballs are and it's just a brutal fact that the eyeballs want much more than news media - they want a lot of other things that the news media aren't providing. So they go where they can get what they want.
Trying to fix any complex problem without addressing the root cause is nearly always going to be futile. The root cause here is something important to society (news media) is intrinsically / structurally impossible to fund organically. The people who need it most either can't or won't pay for it (and many are in the "can't" bucket).
Guess what, there are many things like that. We structurally can't fund hospitals, roads, defense either based on organic funding methods. When we want or need something that can't be funded like that, there is one party that is supposed to step up to the table - designed by intent for that purpose.
Which is all to say that to me, a lot of what is happening here is theatrics because governments want to avoid doing the actual hard thing which is convincing taxpayers that this should be part of what we support through broad based support as societies.
Trying to fix any complex problem without addressing the root cause is nearly always going to be futile. The root cause here is something important to society (news media) is intrinsically / structurally impossible to fund organically. The people who need it most either can't or won't pay for it (and many are in the "can't" bucket).
Guess what, there are many things like that. We structurally can't fund hospitals, roads, defense either based on organic funding methods. When we want or need something that can't be funded like that, there is one party that is supposed to step up to the table - designed by intent for that purpose.
Which is all to say that to me, a lot of what is happening here is theatrics because governments want to avoid doing the actual hard thing which is convincing taxpayers that this should be part of what we support through broad based support as societies.