The "California Journalism Prevention Act" was voted out of committed last week according to Newsguild. Its next step is the Appropriations committee, followed by a floor vote. The bill would "create a journalism usage fee from digital advertising giants like Google/Alphabet and Meta/Facebook… The bill mandates that 70% of the funds from the fees would be reinvested into preserving journalism jobs in the state." The author supports the bill, and being a journalist, engages in euphemism in order to obscure the truth. It is, in fact, a tax levied on social media platforms for linking to news stories.
That's right: having outsourced their traffic to those platforms, the California news industry now wants to disincentivize them… sending traffic. The Economist earlier this year had a nice write-up on what happened in Canada after a similar measure was passed there: national outlets lost 64% of their engagement & local outlets 85%.