You are conflating separate concerns. Advertising is a whole different ball game. Though, to belabor this metaphor, it is played in the same arena. As far as I

You are conflating separate concerns. Advertising is a whole different ball game. Though, to belabor this metaphor, it is played in the same arena. As far as I am aware, newspapers did not typically have de jure monopolies. Presumably, you are thinking of telecoms as a comparison. But an apparent de facto monopoly could easily arise based on the previously mentioned physical constraints for actually handling paper media. It only makes sense to send the trucks so far. But in populated areas customers could easily have access to multiple different papers. Edit: as far as the "forced bundle" is concerned, that AGAIN comes back to the inherent difficulty of producing and distributing paper media relative to the content contained on that media. It's pretty easy to include a simple report of the zoning board meeting in the content you are already printing and distributing but it doesn't make sense to run a separate production line to produce a separate version of the paper.