Canada

Yes there does! Having bought subscriptions to a few of my favourite news sites, I'm struck by how much worse the experience is than something like google news. I'll need to figure out something, because I only just want news, not a digital version of the newspaper and i certainly don't want another 100 MB app.

Aggregation is a killer feature for news, and providers need to figure out how to make it work without a tech company eating their lunch. Either through activitypub or something else, but hopefully a public standard of some sort so they aren't beholden to a corporation.

Of course, we would have to put serious limiters on government input on the sites to make sure that we keep free speech. I don’t even mean that in the sense of “I want to say hateful things!” but in the sense that I don’t want heavy restrictions on the news that I see, especially not by any one political group. (Looking at you, elections time).

You could set up a crown corporation similar to the CBC where it's given a mandate to do the things you want but has some amount of separation from government control, outside of funding.