Agree with your advocacy for a competitive, market-driven news business, and the description of the proposed trust fund as a white flag for journalism.

One quibble on your description of Facebook’s business: “News is a tiny part of Facebook’s business. It makes its money largely out of non-news related content. It might profit from news organisation’s material, but not so much.” Facebook makes its money from advertising, using content (news and otherwise) to attract eyeballs and to provide targeting data to its real customers, the advertisers. The nature of the content is completely irrelevant to the business, as long as those eyeballs and clicks keep coming.

If Facebook (and Google) have any responsibility to the news business, it’s related to their capture of almost all of the digital advertising revenue that was supposed to flow to news organizations (replacing print or broadcast ad revenue) when they expanded to web and mobile distribution.