I would expand on that on two levels. One point to emphasize is that journalism, especially local and provincial—or, in the United States context, state-level—requires a fair amount of direct labour to go out and talk to politicians, public officials and members of the community, and there's no way to technologically replace that fact. It is expensive, and you need to hire journalists to do that work. It is always going to be media companies and journalism outlets doing that.
In terms of the other side of the equation, of big tech being able to monopolize this, I want to emphasize that we are not dealing with a situation of abstract market forces or price signals, but rather a group of companies that have developed and, through a series of mergers in particular, created a particular market structure whereby they are able to take an overwhelming majority of the income and profits.
Google owns the ad management tools for both the advertisers buying ads—the online advertising market—and the media companies selling ads. Likewise, in those same markets, Meta and Google have been caught bid-rigging for their ads for those exact advertising tools.
We are not dealing with a technological change that just fell out of the sky. It is a market structure whereby they can determine who gets paid what to maximize their own profits. Google and Meta are neither paying directly toward the media companies nor even employing journalists. Instead, they are using the existence of journalism of which, online at this point, they have created the expectation that it is largely free to be channelled as traffic through their own platforms and not compensated for.