Perhaps someone with more familiarity with this issue can explain why negotiating collectively with news orgs would mean that the benefits facebook provides in

Perhaps someone with more familiarity with this issue can explain why negotiating collectively with news orgs would mean that the benefits facebook provides in terms of increasing traffic would not play a role in those negotiations. Facebook can always threaten to walk and not strike a deal, just as the news orgs can threaten to walk. But right now there are anti-trust issues if they try to collectively bargain with Facebook, and to this naive commentator it seems like letting them bargain collectively seems like a reasonable compromise -- better than a legally mandated fee.