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Laws of economics are pretty clear on this. News, especially international news, is a commodity. Government can impose monopoly ruls to try to allow distribution channels to extract more, but technology (and users) will find ways to route around this as damage to the network.

People don't want to pay for news. They don't like ads, but will tolerate them to a point, and most definitely don't want to pay for subscriptions. Laws can change behavior short term but long term the better product and platform will win.

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> People don't want to pay for news. They don't like ads, but will tolerate them to a point, and most definitely don't want to pay for subscriptions

I'm sure I'm not the only person here who subscribes to LWN. People with a special interest in a particular topic are willing to pay subscriptions to specialist news outfits covering that topic. Not enough for them to grow rich but enough for many of them to survive. The real struggle is retaining subscribers to mass-market generalist news as opposed to niche speciality news sources.

Yeah, I think this is why GP said "especially international news". The more producers capable of producing the content, the lower value the content is.

The problem isn't so much that people don't want to pay for news. But if the competition is giving away news for free, news now has a price of zero.

You have a global network of individuals and companies producing news. If you offer good news for $5 but someone else is offering acceptable news for $0 that acceptable news is going to win every time.

Exactly

> Hence, the key effect of commoditization is that the pricing power of the manufacturer or brand owner is weakened: when products become more similar from a buyer's point of view, they will tend to buy the cheapest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commoditization

I'm willing to pay for news that treats me as a relatively intelligent person who needs well-sourced information to make decisions, not as an unprincipled sucker who should be convinced of what the author thinks is true by any rhetoric possible.

The two I'm looking at paying for in the near future are https://thebrowser.com/ and https://www.slow-journalism.com/, but I'd pay a lot more than that for some kind of Realpolitik executive summary which gave overviews of the most important trends, including the most common mainstream opinions and an analysis of any available evidence.

Laws are never necessary where economics or physics already lead to the desired outcome.

So, arguing that “these politicians don’t understand economics” is like saying “laws against theft don’t understand how easy it is to break a window”.

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