No, don't feel bad. They threaten everyone. They threatened to do bad things in the U.S., too, when the bill, the JCPA, appeared to be on its way to getting voted on at the Senate judiciary committee.
Whether they want to admit it or not, I think Facebook and Google recognize that newspapers and quality journalism actually prevent their platforms from becoming a cesspool. Imagine if all of this stuff came out, as they're threatening to do, and they take out the quality and just leave in the low quality or the misinformation. The whole platform becomes a cesspool. That's going to cause advertisers to leave. It's going to cause users to leave.
We should take their threats seriously, but I don't think the threats amount to anything at the end of the day. They need the news publishers, but they don't have to pay for it right now because the power imbalance is so shifted in the favour of the platforms, right?
What we're asking for is to create a structure so that an arbitrator could make a call as to what the fair market value is, and then we could go on about our way. Once that payment is made, there's no link tax, respectfully; Ms. Gardner talked about a link tax. You don't pay extra for each time someone clicks or for each link that gets posted. You pay a one-time lump sum fee for access. After that, you're free to do with the content whatever you want, subject to the applicable copyright law.