Google avoids "link tax" bill with deal to fund California journalism and AI

"Instead of meaningful reform to the market, we'll make this bandaid temporary measure Google will pay into, get to keep Google donations to our campaigns, and kick the can down the road 5 years." - Politicians

Newspaper companies once made most of their money from ads. It was not uncommon to have an entire floor for classifieds.

Then along came modern adtech and it's data driven behavioural advertising. Newspapers couldn't compete with this. Nowdays they'd be lucky to have a small corner of the office taking classifieds as an example.

The problem with the modern adtech is its extreme privacy violations to the point of GPS tracking vulnerable/marginalised groups and opening them up to physical harm. You can be tracked by the cops just for using a "free" weather app using GPS data sent by that app to ad brokers.

However, I wouldn't want to see the big corporate newspapers returned to their previous position of being the all powerful gatekeeper of most news either.