No one wants to be advertised to, but powerful lobbies argue that ending ads will lower consumption and thus harm the economy; and no politician wants to lower GDP.
No one wants to be spied on, but powerful lobbies argue tracking people allow better security; and no politician wants to be soft on crime and terrorism.
Even when you give them the option to pay, with no ads or tracking, the conversion rate is still around 0.5-1%.
All the paywalled news agencies want a monthly subscription. But I, as someone who doesn't like getting all their news from a single source, am not interested in signing up for news subscriptions because the cost would pile up fast, and to be honest I don't read that many news articles in a given month.
I think we need some kind of usage based billing system where participating outlets can set a price per article, and users can agree to be billed for that article when they go to view it.