To provide an alternative take / a couple thought fragments on the idea of a "link tax"... the problem is that the Internet has turned anything involving news into a ruthless race to the bottom. Good journalism, surprise, costs serious money - you need to pay journalists, and if you're actually willing to step on people's toes, you need to have serious budgets allocated for lawyers and damage claims, should the courts not interpret the facts as liberal as you did. And on top of that, the Internet has won the fight against stuff printed on dead trees for convenience reasons.

Unfortunately, the business model of the Internet is at its core rabid capitalism: the one with the lowest cost for the end user usually wins the most eyeballs, which means free, ad supported tabloid/outrage bait. And as we've seen with COVID or with the conspiracy peddlers that ended up pushing the 45th to office, that can have serious side effects on society as a whole.

So, assuming that high quality journalism is essential to the survival of democracy (alone because journalism is vital in holding politicians and companies accountable), there are only a few options left:

1. the government pays for journalism and distributes it for free, either in the form of outright tax funding or via mandatory fees. This is the old "public broadcast" model, and it requires a lot of effort to keep it accepted as neutral by the general public, and it needs constant oversight to not become a government mouthpiece (an allegation that continues to rise in popularity in the case of the BBC, and something that has already happened in Hungary with disastrous effects). Also, independent media don't like it very much because obviously, they can't compete with "free and high quality".

2. the government bans or introduces strict licensing requirements to get foreign influence (such as propaganda content farms like in the Balkans [1]) under control. That raises serious constitutional issues in most Western democracies and legitimizes Putin doing the same in Russia.

3. governments go to those who actually make the money on the back of legitimate content creators and force them to hand over a part of the profit. Aka, a "link tax".

It's hard for me to sympathize with Google, one of the richest companies on the planet, and Facebook which has played a key role in tearing our societies apart by letting fake news and propaganda run rampant on their platform. Pay your goddamn bills.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-balkan-troll-farms-are-spr...