Google and Facebook continue to gobble up the digital advertising market, siphoning away revenue that once paid for the quality journalism that Google and Facebook now offer for free.

They are gaining increasing control over digital distribution, so newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos.

And for all of Google’s and Facebook’s efforts to support journalism by helping news organizations find new revenue streams — and survive in the new world that these sites helped create — they are, at the end of the day, the royals of the court. Quality news providers are the supplicants and the serfs.

It’s an uneasy alliance that has publishers chafing at the returns they receive from Google and Facebook, which rely on the free flow of premium news and information.