The web was fine without these commercial companies. Not like their content added a ton of value to the web. The news is mostly propaganda anyhow, belonging to various wealthy parties that want people to pay for their propaganda... If they funded it completely out of pocket, that would be a more honest approach to these "businesses".
The other companies like FB, they took bunch of content that belonged to users that users had tools to publish for free and willingly put them in silos.
There is maybe 1% of content that needs saving. The rest of it is the same sort of drivel that you get from tabloids and I say making that stuff economic non-viable is a good thing. The elites though care about making it work because otherwise the democratic media is "fake news", meaning news heavily slanted to what people want to believe rather than what they are told to believe. If you want that, then they should pay for it. Not the people through taxes as Bernie is proposing... or this scheme.
Other than that we have good models like BBC or PBS on how to do independent government and publically funded programming.
In fact if we re-engineered the web so that there was no data sharing between various systems on the frontend, something like everything has to be served from the same canonical domain, and put it in law that you could not share data between various private companies on the backend without heavy regulation and oversight that would be a better web. I mean prism is already sharing all this data, why don't we put controls on that?