Any regular reader of FTVLive knows I’m not a fan of Facebook.

Stations work and run contest to get viewers to “Like” their page on Facebook and then brag about how many people do.

The problem? The TV stations don’t own Facebook and are basically trying to get viewers to spend more time a a website that they don’t own.

I always thought that TV stations should be spending that time and money to bring viewers to their website and not one owned by Mark Zuckerberg.

Many newspapers have gone out of business or are close to do so and you can point to sites like Facebook, Google and other big tech companies as one of the reasons for that.

But, that might soon be changing.

The NY Times reports that Australian regulators see as the cause of local journalism’s demise — the near monopolistic power of Google and Facebook. And it has set off a chain of events that could shift the balance of power between big tech and the news at a dire moment for journalism.

“Global tech companies are not beyond national laws, especially when there is so much at stake,” Rod Sims, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Sims and a like-minded regulator in France, Isabelle de Silva, are challenging a universally accepted fact of the internet: that Google and Facebook can carry content created by news organizations without directly paying the organizations for creating it. Last month, as the coronavirus put hundreds of publishers out of business around the world, the Australian government instructed Mr. Sims to force the platforms to negotiate payments with newspaper publishers — making it the first country to do so.

In France regulators are demanding that Google cut a deal to pay publishers, the pandemic crisis has added “all the more urgency,” said de Silva, the president of the French Competition Authority, which is enforcing a European Commission change to copyright law that will soon take effect across the continent.

In this dire moment, the news business is starting to win some political battles. The platforms have begun to realize that while news isn’t as popular as baby pictures or celebrities, it’s the industry politicians care about most.

The politicians who matter, at least, who are less and less to be found here in the United States.