I think they're fighting the wrong fight, and too late. The advertising angle here seems moot, especially since news outlets had been self-sabotaging themselves

I think they're fighting the wrong fight, and too late. The advertising angle here seems moot, especially since news outlets had been self-sabotaging themselves out of relevance in the digital age for years before Google was even a thing. 1) Google found a way to get ads to consumers that is more attractive to advertisers. Whether or not they have a monopoly, advertisers won't suddenly go back to ineffective news media ads if Google is broken up and makes room for other competitors that also get ads to consumers better than legacy media does the job 2) Their ad revenue is much more limited by lack of readership than anything else. #2 is why I said it's not just the wrong fight, but too late: online news sold out their future to Google years ago in a race to the bottom with each other. No one wanted to stop Google scraping their content because, once a few outlets allowed it, none were willing to cede readership to others that might get more attention from Google. So pretty much everyone allowed Google to scrape news content and present chunks of it in search results, and over time is means fewer people have any reason to click through. At the same time the outlets ramped up syndication and cut budgets on original work so readers had even less reason to click through to any particular site. That's where they lost the fight. If Google has an ad monopoly, the news outlets have no special status as victims of it and there every reason to believe their decades-long foot shooting would have placed them exactly where they are anyway.