It’s a little different if the agreement is visibility and advertising revenue or your selling subscriptions.

If news websites where unhappy about the deal they are free to use robots.txt and search engines will ignore them. So, clearly they receive some benefit and are simply arguing they should receive more.

The problem is that the advertising revenue is also controlled by Google. Google plays both sides of the ad auction market while also controlling site visibility in the first place.

In short, Google decides how many people sees your site and how much Google pays for those views. News sites have no power to negotiate without government intervention.

There are alternatives to Google for advertising revenue.

No intermediary needed, newspapers used sell advertising directly.

They sure like buying up all the competition though.

And thus we arrive at the underlying problem. How about we address the root instead of the symptoms?

out of the French control given that Google is an American business and it doesn't look like the US is ever going to seriously bring anti-trust to bear on tech. So countries have to do what they can locally.

Is it really out of their control? What happens if they say "Google Search and Google Play can't be the same company in France"?

Option one, they separate to keep the market. Probably not, but maybe if the whole EU does it.

Option two, Google is banned from France and some competitors take root. Those competitors are not going to limit themselves to the market in France, so now there is more competition everywhere.

Either one is a pretty good kick in the pants that would increase the level of competition.