I agree from a different direction. By capitulating to Meta for so long, they have lost all their agency in this issue. They should have given Facebook and Google a hard No when they first started being plagiarised.
If your readers are primarily getting access to your news articles through a third party, they are no longer your news articles. What the news services should be doing is Syndicating (as in RSS) through their own Activity Pub identities.
The Conversation is doing it.
https://mastodon.social/@theconversationauThe BBC are experimenting with it. https://social.bbc/about
Press.coop are syndicating a lot of other news services. (And therefore is unofficially claiming possession of and controlling the user experience of the content) https://press.coop/directory
when they first started being plagiarised
But they’re not being plagiarised. They’re being linked to. If you start saying “no, people can’t post links to us”, that breaks the entire foundation of the Web.
I agree completely that they’ve been far too reliant on Google and especially Facebook lately, and that investing in their own platforms that they control would have been a much smarter strategy. I just view this as a tangential concern to the one of link taxes.
