I don’t agree with the solution the government came up with, but the problem still exists and I don’t understand it well enough to come up with an alternative solution.
Making news is expensive, and good quality news (not mucked up by corporate interests) needs a way to fund that work. We don’t want news to be an outlet for corporations investing in a mouthpiece. So traditionally this was done through advertising.
Now people barely ever click through to the websites so the advertising doesn’t work. Meanwhile the places where people ARE seeing the news do have ads. The content is produced by one party, and the profit goes to another.
The problem exists and needs a solution, but I don’t know what it might be. Australia brought in a similar law successfully and Facebook/Google came to a deal. Canada might also be able to do that?
The other long term solution IMO is to make the platforms obsolete with things like Mastodon and Lemmy. That might take some time though