Interesting article. I don't think Facebook or Google set out originally to be newspapers, but the author of this argues that that is essentially what they have become and they should therefore be subject to the same regulations and taxes as all ad-driven media businesses. Makes sense to me. I think we all cheered them when they were using technology to seemingly turn the archaic media company model on it's head (and give us "free" services), but when it came time to pay back investors Google and Facebook quickly adopted the same old model of selling advertising space.