[alephknoll]

> I have sympathy for news publishers

Why? They are the most spoiled, privileged and entitled group out there. Not only did they force google, facebook, etc to give them preferential treatment in search/algorithm/etc, now they want google, facebook, etc to pay them for the 'privilege' of giving them preferential treatment. Not only do they want google/facebook to send users to their sites, they want google/facebook to pay them for that privilege. The shameless hubris.

> therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves.

No. That's for authoritarian countries like britain and china.

> huge risks of unintended consequence

But government funded news has no risks?

What we need is to break up google/facebook/etc. We need competition in the search, smartphone, social media, etc space. The fundamental problem is that two companies control so much of american mindshare.