Exactly opposite. They are getting their traffic from aggregators (does not matter whether Google, Facebook or anyone else), they do not have brands with big enough recognition to stand on their own.

In the eshop part of the web, there are price aggregators and the eshops pay them for the traffic they are getting, i.e. exactly opposite as the news publishers demand. It would be nonsense, if the eshops demanded that the aggregators pay them, because they make use of data of their sortiment or whatever. Even Amazon pays for the referrals, it is not being paid by the referrals for the privilege of being one.

It was always that he, who brings the customers, is getting paid for that. Not vice-versa.

He means that smaller publishers don't have a brand yet where people just browse directly to their site. Those smaller publishers get a disproportionate share of views when one of their article trends on google news.

Look at their financial reports. Unless by "smaller" you mean 99.5% or more of them, you're inaccurate.

The only news services that would survive this regulation are the public/subsidized ones, pretty much. Maybe that's exactly the goal: eliminate independent press.

I guess the only solution for news sites now is massive mergers into a handful of news giants that do have the brand name to stand on their own without needing links from aggregators.

Of course it would help a lot if they also dramatically revised the way they offer their content on the internet. Many news sites are rather awful.