Caesar.: With "kinda works" I meant Google News. The front page technically is not shown, but you can click the "News" tab and it still shows the same results from the news pages.
I don't think more taxes (like the Google tax) is the solution. But in daily life Internet keeps running the same.
But no one seems to be collecting the "tax" at all. How is that "kinda works"? Then add that views are down, thus ad revenue is likely less...seems to be the opposite of working. Google didn't block more content because publishers were smart not to try to push the issue.
Not to mention the core idea behind it, that somehow Google and Facebook are profiting off their created content by linking to their sites. If they cannot find a way to profit off more views, seems to be the publisher's fault. Remove snippets and headlines and why will anyone click a link to their site?
The related problem are groups like in the U.S. such as the Associated Press. The reason you can find 12 different articles saying the exact thing is that they are the same story. If you are a member of the Associate Press, it gives you the right to "re-work" an article by another AP member and publish it yourself. A legacy of back in the day, if say a newspaper in Detroit were writing about something that happened in New York, you didn't have to send your own reporter to investigate. But with the Internet, one sees all 12 articles about the same thing from every city. Some people even think that the fact its repeated 12 times, it's even more true, when 11 of the writers did nothing but copy and paste and change a few words. These "mass media" press organizations have these internal agreements allowing each other to copy each other's content.
Awhile back I found a story where someone tried to track down the origin of one of those Korean gaming cafe deaths. The story was published on the Internet everywhere but in tracking it down, it seemed to all come from one source and in trying to track it down, talking to police in Korea, there was no actual report of a person by that name even dying that day.
But some people call that 12 sources and "proof", even when all of them copy a story from just the one source...
If the newspapers have a problem with competition, it's all the local news sources. It's the fact that people can get their news from "everywhere" and don't need a full newspaper in every city.