Day 0 Event #252 Editorial Media and Big Tech Dependency the Material Conditions for a Free and Resilient NeWS Media

Summary

This discussion at the Internet Governance Forum focused on the material conditions for distribution of media content and the challenges posed by concentrated ownership of internet infrastructure to free and resilient journalism. The session was chaired by Professor Helle Sjøvåg and featured keynote speakers Chris Disspain and Anja Schiffrin, followed by a panel discussion with experts from various fields.

Chris Disspain emphasized that the internet is not an abstract space but a physical, centralized, and privately owned infrastructure controlled by a handful of companies. He warned that this concentration creates potential vulnerabilities and choke points that can be used to silence journalism or manipulate public discourse, particularly through control of undersea cables and content delivery networks. However, he noted that press barons have always tried to manipulate media, and humans demonstrate remarkable resilience in seeking information even when access is restricted.

Anja Schiffrin painted a more dire picture, describing the current moment as terrifying due to the dismantling of democratic institutions by autocrats supported by oligarchs and corporations. She argued that platform companies have been bad actors, polluting the information ecosystem, stealing intellectual property, and engaging in monopolistic practices. Schiffrin highlighted how these companies resist regulation through lobbying and threats to exit markets, as seen in Australia and Canada when news payment laws were implemented.

The panel discussion revealed broad agreement about the concentration of power in US-based technology companies and the resulting dependencies for news media globally. Panelists discussed how this affects different regions, with African representatives noting particular vulnerability due to limited bargaining power. The discussion covered various regulatory approaches, from Australia’s bargaining code to potential AI taxes and digital levies.

Several speakers emphasized the importance of multi-stakeholder approaches to governance rather than traditional regulation, noting that authoritarian governments might interpret “regulation” differently than democratic societies intend. The panel also discussed the role of ethics in journalism and the need for transparency and accountability from platform companies. Ultimately, the discussion concluded that while the challenges are significant, there are still choices available to governments, media organizations, and citizens to build more resilient information ecosystems through collective action, alternative infrastructure development, and maintaining high journalistic standards.

Keypoints

## Major Discussion Points:

– **Concentrated ownership of internet infrastructure and its threat to media independence**: The discussion extensively covered how a small number of US-based technology companies now control critical internet infrastructure (undersea cables, content delivery networks, cloud services, social media platforms), creating potential vulnerabilities and dependencies for news media globally.

– **Platform dependency and the collapse of traditional media business models**: Speakers addressed how news organizations have become increasingly dependent on tech platforms for distribution, audience reach, and revenue, while these same platforms have disrupted traditional advertising models and appropriated content without fair compensation.

– **Regulatory challenges and the need for global coordination**: The conversation explored the difficulties of regulating global tech companies through national laws, the failure of self-regulation, and the need for international cooperation – particularly given the US government’s opposition to tech regulation and taxation.

– **Geopolitical implications and digital sovereignty**: Participants discussed how concentrated tech ownership creates geopolitical vulnerabilities, with particular attention to the power dynamics between the US, China, and smaller nations, and the need for countries to develop digital sovereignty and alternative infrastructure.

– **The role of AI in exacerbating existing dependencies**: The discussion touched on how artificial intelligence development by the same tech giants is creating new forms of content appropriation and further threatening independent journalism’s sustainability.

## Overall Purpose:

The discussion aimed to examine the material conditions and infrastructure dependencies that affect the sustainability and independence of news media in the digital age, with a focus on identifying policy solutions and alternatives to ensure a free and resilient media ecosystem globally.

## Overall Tone:

The discussion maintained a consistently serious and concerned tone throughout, with speakers expressing alarm about current trends while remaining constructively focused on solutions. The tone was academic yet urgent, with participants acknowledging the gravity of the challenges while avoiding despair. There was a notable shift from diagnostic (identifying problems) in the keynotes to more solution-oriented discussions during the panel, though the overall sense of urgency remained constant. The speakers demonstrated both expertise and genuine worry about democratic institutions and press freedom.

Speakers

**Speakers from the provided list:**

– **Helle Sjovaag** – Professor of journalism at the University of Stavanger, Norway; research focuses on material conditions for distribution of media content; session chair

– **Chris Disspain** – Corporate lawyer; former CEO of Australian Internet Country Code manager for 16 years; former ICANN director for 9 years; former member of UN Secretary General’s Internet Governance Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group for 6 years; keynote speaker

– **Anya Schiffrin** – Director of the Technology, Media and Communications Program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs; PhD from University of Navarra on online disinformation; former journalist covering Asia and Europe; keynote speaker

– **Pamella Sittoni** – Kenyan journalist and author; media and communications consultant; public editor at Nation Media Group in Kenya; former executive editor and managing editor of Daily Nation, the East African, and Standard newspapers; former communications specialist for UNICEF Kenya

– **Kjersti Loken Stavrum** – CEO of Tineus Trust; chair of the board of Shipstead Media; background as journalist and editor; former general secretary of Norwegian Press Association; former chair of Norwegian Freedom of Expression Commission

– **Rasmus Kleis Nielsen** – Professor at University of Copenhagen, Denmark; senior research associate at Reuters Institute for the study of journalism; former director of research at Reuters Institute; co-author of annual Reuters Institute digital news report

– **Anine Kierulf** – Norwegian lawyer; associate professor of constitutional law at University of Oslo; special advisor to Norwegian Human Rights Institution; former legal advisor to Council of Europe; former chair of Commission of Academic Freedom of Expression in Norway

– **Tawfik Jelassi** – Assistant director general for communications and information at UNESCO; PhD in information systems from New York University; former minister of higher education, scientific research and information and communication technologies in Tunisia; professor of strategy and technology management at IND Lausanne

**Additional speakers:**

None identified beyond the provided speakers names list.

# Internet Governance Forum Discussion: Material Conditions for Distribution of Media Content

## Introduction and Context

This Internet Governance Forum session examined the material conditions and infrastructure dependencies that affect the sustainability and independence of news media in the digital age. Chaired by Professor Helle Sjøvåg from the University of Stavanger, the discussion brought together experts from journalism, law, technology governance, and media policy to address the challenges posed by concentrated ownership of internet infrastructure to free and resilient journalism.

## Opening Remarks: Constitutional Framework and Infrastructure Dependencies

Professor Helle Sjøvåg opened the session by highlighting Norway’s unique constitutional framework regarding information infrastructure. She noted that paragraph 100 of the Norwegian constitution establishes the state’s responsibility for creating conditions that facilitate open and enlightened public discourse. This constitutional provision becomes particularly relevant when considering how media organizations have become dependent on infrastructure owned by a small number of global technology companies.

Sjøvåg emphasized that this dependency creates vulnerabilities for democratic discourse, as media outlets rely on platforms and infrastructure controlled by entities with their own commercial and political interests. The session aimed to explore these material conditions and their implications for media independence and democratic governance.

## Keynote Presentations

### Chris Disspain: The Physical Reality of Internet Infrastructure

Chris Disspain, a corporate lawyer and former ICANN director, provided a detailed examination of internet infrastructure realities. He emphasized that the internet is not an abstract space but rather a physical, centralized, and privately owned infrastructure controlled by a handful of companies.

Disspain illustrated infrastructure vulnerabilities with specific examples, including a blackout that affected Portugal and Spain when undersea cables were damaged, and the UK’s experience with water system privatization, which he used as an analogy for infrastructure dependency risks. He highlighted how big tech companies now control multiple layers of infrastructure, from undersea cables to Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), creating vertical integration that affects media distribution.

However, Disspain maintained a historical perspective on media manipulation, noting that “press barons have forever tried to manipulate what we read, what we see, what we hear” but haven’t succeeded completely. He expressed cautious optimism about human resilience, citing examples of people using old modems to maintain internet access during shutdowns, demonstrating adaptability in seeking information even when access is restricted.

Importantly, Disspain warned against using the term “regulation” in international policy discussions, as different governments interpret this differently. He noted that authoritarian regimes might use calls for regulation to justify censorship, preferring instead to discuss “global policy” developed through multi-stakeholder processes.

### Anja Schifrin: Platform Power and Democratic Threats

Anja Schifrin, Director of the Technology, Media and Communications Program at Columbia University, presented a more urgent assessment of current challenges. She described how platform companies have become problematic actors in the information ecosystem, engaging in what she characterized as monopolistic practices and intellectual property appropriation.

Schifrin provided detailed analysis of how platforms resist regulation, describing their use of standard corporate lobbying tactics, public relations campaigns, and misinformation about proposed laws. She highlighted examples from Australia and Canada, where platforms threatened to exit markets when news payment laws were implemented.

A significant element of Schifrin’s presentation was her analysis of US government opposition to tech regulation globally. She noted that the US actively opposes tech regulation and taxation worldwide, citing a “revenge tax” provision that was included in Trump’s budget, though she noted this was opposed by the US business community. She suggested that US isolationism might actually benefit global policy development by removing a major obstacle to progress.

Schifrin also addressed artificial intelligence development, noting how AI tools like Google’s AI overview reduce traffic to media websites by presenting information directly rather than directing users to original sources, creating new forms of content appropriation.

## Panel Discussion: Regional Perspectives and Policy Solutions

### African Perspectives on Platform Dependencies

Pamella Sittoni, a Kenyan journalist and media consultant, provided insights into how platform concentration affects developing countries. She highlighted the asymmetrical power relationships, where platform exit threats would have minimal impact on company profits but major consequences for information access in African markets.

Sittoni emphasized the lack of accountability in platform operations, noting how companies can arbitrarily choose which media organizations to work with and how much to pay them. She stressed the need for consistent global standards, arguing that what platforms are compelled to do in Australia should also apply in Africa.

Particularly concerning was her example of how platform data sharing can endanger lives. She cited a specific Kenyan case where someone was murdered in police cells after being tracked through information shared by platforms, highlighting the life-and-death implications of platform power beyond economic concerns.

### Nordic Models and Policy Innovation

Kjersti Loken Stavrum, CEO of Tineus Trust and former general secretary of the Norwegian Press Association, brought insights from Nordic media governance. She highlighted successful Nordic press ethical systems and their role in building trust and maintaining standards.

Stavrum introduced the “polluter pays” principle as a framework for platform accountability, drawing parallels with environmental policy. She argued that platforms should be held responsible for information pollution in the same way companies are held accountable for environmental damage.

She also provided specific examples of media success, noting that VG, a Norwegian publication, maintains impressive statistics with 2 million daily visitors and 1.5 million accessing the site directly rather than through platforms, demonstrating that direct audience relationships remain possible.

Stavrum noted a shift in European perspectives on transatlantic cooperation, observing that assumptions about US support for liberal democracy have been challenged by recent developments in digital governance.

### Academic and Legal Analysis

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen from the University of Copenhagen provided historical context, arguing that current concentration represents “the same old story only much more pronounced.” He emphasized the political nature of current conditions, noting a long period where corporate consolidation was “not only accepted but endorsed and wholeheartedly pursued by establishment political parties of both the centre-left and the centre-right.”

Nielsen challenged narratives of inevitability, referencing a 2015 Obama quote about US companies creating the internet while arguing against accepting “pretend helplessness of powerful politicians.” He noted that public alternatives exist, including decentralized, federated, and open-source solutions, but few in power pursue them.

Anine Kierulf, a constitutional law professor from the University of Oslo, addressed the challenge that law consistently trails behind fast-moving technology, with democracy’s inherent deliberative processes making rapid regulation difficult. She noted that current students have better critical thinking abilities than previous generations but less factual knowledge, highlighting the complexity of digital literacy challenges.

### UNESCO’s Multi-Stakeholder Approach

Tawfik Jelassi, Assistant Director General for Communications and Information at UNESCO, presented the organization’s approach to digital platform governance through inclusive processes involving 194 member states. He emphasized the principle that “without facts there is no truth, without truth there is no trust, and without trust there is no shared reality for action.”

Jelassi argued that ethics standards need to be both local and global since platforms operate across borders. He highlighted UNESCO’s work in developing guidelines that balance global principles with local implementation needs.

## Policy Discussions and Recommendations

The discussion generated several specific policy approaches. Speakers advocated for collective negotiation by countries and publishers rather than individual approaches to increase bargaining power against platforms. There were calls to develop national and regional digital infrastructure as alternatives to dependency on US-based technology companies.

Several participants supported implementing transparency and accountability requirements for digital infrastructure decisions, with human rights and freedom of expression as foundational principles. More innovative suggestions included requiring platforms to post bonds before operating in countries to ensure fines can be collected, and pursuing digital levies with funding earmarked for journalism support.

The panel also discussed the importance of digital literacy education and establishing regional press ethical systems to build trust and maintain standards.

## Unresolved Challenges

The discussion highlighted several ongoing challenges, including how to balance national sovereignty with the global nature of internet infrastructure, and questions about whether regional alternatives to US tech companies would behave fundamentally differently. The conversation also touched on concerns about Chinese alternatives potentially filling gaps if US companies exit markets.

Technical questions about enforcement mechanisms, funding for public alternatives, and fair compensation for AI use of media content remained largely unresolved. The complexity of achieving digital sovereignty for smaller states given resource constraints was acknowledged but not fully addressed.

## Conclusion

The session demonstrated broad recognition that internet infrastructure concentration creates vulnerabilities for media independence and democratic discourse. While speakers acknowledged the severity of current challenges, they also emphasized that alternatives exist and that current conditions result from specific political and economic choices rather than technological inevitability.

The discussion highlighted the need for continued dialogue and experimentation in developing policy mechanisms that can address platform power while maintaining democratic values. The emphasis on multi-stakeholder approaches and collective action provides a framework for future policy development, though specific implementation mechanisms require further development.

The session reinforced that addressing these challenges requires active engagement from political leaders, media organizations, and citizens rather than accepting current dependencies as permanent features of the digital landscape.

Helle Sjovaag: and big tech. My name is Helle Sjøvåg. I will be chairing this session today. I’m a professor of journalism at the University of Stavanger here in Norway, and my research currently is about the material conditions for distribution of media content. And editorial media are, as you know, responsible for overseeing power and for providing an arena for democratic conversation. So here in Norway, it’s the responsibility of the state to ensure that the infrastructure for information, communication and expression is open, diverse and free to all. This responsibility is in fact embedded in paragraph 100 of the Norwegian constitution on freedom of expression. So media used to largely own distribution infrastructures in the past, they owned television towers that relayed broadcasting signals, the trucks that delivered newspapers, and they leased the bandwidth where radio signals were transmitted. But they have also always been somewhat reliant on third parties to get their content out to audiences. In the past, these were cable distribution companies, video stores, movie theaters and newsstands. Today, news delivery is modular. It’s distributed through a range of platforms, most of which are owned by a handful of US-based technology companies. News media rely on terrestrial and submarine fiber cables to enable hyperlinking, but also co-production and audience reach. They need content delivery networks like Akamai to stream content. They rely on cloud service. like the ones provided by Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to store and manage data. They rely on web architecture like the ones provided by Google for website functionality. And news media have also relied for quite some time on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to reach and engage their users and also to generate advertising revenue. More and more, news media also grow increasingly dependent on the AI services provided by Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon for research and production, analytics and also personalization of content. So, many of the key players here, they operate across sectors. Now this creates potential vulnerabilities along the value chain of news production and distribution raising questions as to the resilience of the overall technological infrastructure for news globally. These resilience issues emerge because these technologies, and these are technologies that work really well by the way, they’re concentrating in power and they’re also concentrating geographically. So, we are quickly approaching the point where it becomes impossible to operate sustainably without these services. So, this leads to issues of dependency and potential capture, posing questions about the resilience of the information ecology overall. So, how does this infrastructure create vulnerabilities for editorial media’s ability to operate sustainably? How do we secure free editorial media in the future? So, we will delve into these issues in this session. We will start by hearing two speakers. keynotes followed by a panel discussion. So our first keynote is by Chris Dispain. Chris is a corporate lawyer who for 16 years was the CEO of the manager of the Australian Internet Country Code where he started the Australian IGF. He was a director of ICANN, so Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, for nine years and he was a member of the United Nations Secretary General’s Internet Governance Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group for six years and he continues to be heavily involved in ICANN and all areas of internet governance. So Chris, the floor is yours.

Chris Disspain: Good morning everybody. This is a really, really weird setup. Hang on, that’s it. Let’s get rid of that. I can hear myself properly, sort of cutting out. Good morning everybody. Thanks for asking me to be here. I’m gonna, I was in two minds about how to do this and in the end I decided that the best thing for me to do is a sort of level set and save all of the sort of controversial stuff for the discussion because I have no doubt there’s going to be some of that. So let me start by asking you to imagine waking up tomorrow morning to find that your favourite news outlet, maybe an independent investigative site or a local newspaper, trying to expose corruption has vanished. Not because it’s run out of money, not because it’s broken the law, but because the infrastructure that it depended on, servers, cloud storage, content delivery systems etc, was quietly turned off by a private company acting in its own interests and with no oversight or transparency. That’s the reality that could happen today. So the question that I’m going to address now is how does the concentrated ownership of the Internet’s infrastructure, affect a free and resilient news media. And in an era where information is both our most valuable resource and our most contested battleground, understanding the invisible hand shaping our access to news is more crucial than ever. We tend to think of the Internet as an abstract space, a borderless cloud, a place where information flows freely. But it’s not some ethereal democratic realm floating above us. It’s physical, centralised and privately owned. At every layer, from the undersea cables that carry data to the data centres that host it, to the platforms that distribute it, real companies control real assets. And with that comes enormous power. So I think we’re all clear what we mean by Internet infrastructure. And I’m going to talk mainly about, with reference mainly to undersea cables and CDNs, content delivery networks, but it applies to all the layers. And these layers aren’t just technical scaffolding. They’re points of control. And when ownership of the layers is concentrated in the hands of a few, then we can create choke points that can be used intentionally or not, to silence journalism, suppress dissent or manipulate public discourse. The concentration isn’t just about market share. It’s about infrastructural power. The ability to shape, restrict or enable the flow of information at the most fundamental level. As platforms and infrastructure providers consolidate, they evolve from mere gatekeepers to architects of the entire media ecosystem. Their control extends from the creation of news, through its distribution, and to how and whether it reaches you at all. When a small number of CDN providers control the infrastructure that delivers most of the web content, they also effectively act as gatekeepers. If they choose, voluntarily or under government or corporate pressure, to restrict access to certain news sources, those outlets may become practically invisible or unreliable. And of course undersea cables are the physical backbone to the global internet and that includes news delivery. A lot of people who aren’t involved in this area think that the undersea cables are all owned by governments, and indeed some of them are, but a lot of them are owned by a small number of corporations, and the number of governments that own them is also very small. Control of this part of the infrastructure enables you to prioritise or deprioritise certain data flows, so you can favour your own platforms, your own services or your own partners. It creates potential choke points where governments or companies can interfere with the transmission of independent journalism, and that’s especially true in the case of crises or conflicts, not that we have any of those around at the moment. It can enable censorship by infrastructure, denial of access and bandwidth throttling. Speaking of censorship, we traditionally worry about government censorship, but corporate censorship can be just as impactful and is often far more opaque. CDNs can remove or block content they consider controversial, false or harmful, and whilst this may align with societal goals, it can also be abused to suppress legitimate investigation or whistleblowers. Infrastructure owners have, at times, been pressured by governments or acted on their own to block content or services. Examples include financial intermediaries cutting off funding to news organisations, app stores removing controversial apps, or network providers shutting down entire countries’ access to the internet during political crises. That’s the imagine you woke up in the morning and you couldn’t access the news channel. There are surveillance and privacy risks as well. Companies that own cables may, can, may, monitor or will be forced to share data with governments. It undermines the confidentiality of journalists, whistleblowers and sources. Surveillance at the infrastructure level, not just the software level, is far harder to detect or to resist. CDNs often handle DNS queries, TLS handshakes and metadata about who accesses which news content and concentrated ownership allows the aggregation of highly sensitive consumption data which could be abused. The concentration can also put economic pressure on independent media. Tech giants who own cables also dominate social media distribution, search engines, cloud hostings, advertising markets, you’ll notice I haven’t named any of them, that’s because I suspect we all know who they are. This vertical integration can financially squeeze independent media who become dependent on a few platforms for both content distribution and monetisation. Infrastructure control gives big companies even more leverage over the digital news economy. And there’s of course the risk of geopolitical weaponisation. Countries that dominate cable ownership, currently the US and China, can pressure or disrupt global information flows. In authoritarian regimes, state-owned or state-influenced companies can influence how news circulates internationally. And for smaller countries, the lack of ownership or control creates a dependency which reduces sovereignty over the information access. History shows that concentrated ownership, whether in traditional media or in digital infrastructure, poses serious risks to media pluralism and independence. When a few entities control the spaces and relationships on which media organisations depend, end. They can shape public discourse not just by what they amplify, but by what they suppress. There’s economic leverage too. News organisations, especially the smaller ones and local outlets, are dependent on the infrastructure owners for access, distribution and revenue. This dependency can erode their editorial independence and long-term sustainability. And there’s homogenisation. Consolidation often leads to less original, more homogenised content with a decline in local reporting and diversity of voices, even if overall content quality doesn’t always suffer. I live in a small village in Norfolk in the UK and it’s reached the point now where the only way that I can really find out about what’s going on in the local area is in the individual parish magazines that still get printed and delivered through the front door, because the local news is over. It doesn’t really exist anymore. There are local papers, but all they have become is the delivery of advertising. The concentration introduces vulnerabilities that threaten the resilience of both the internet and the news media. Again, a small number of companies control critical infrastructure, so outages or targeted disruptions can have outsized effects. Look at the recent blackout in Portugal and Spain. If that doesn’t highlight the importance of diverse providers and the reliance on a few actors making the system brittle, then nothing does. Witness the beautiful and glorious United Kingdom’s privatised water system, where individual water authorities have a monopoly over delivery of water in various parts of the country, nearly all of whom are polluting our rivers and waterways so that they can pay more money to their shareholders. Infrastructure owners can also become instruments of the state or corporate power. and wielding their control to advance political or economic interests, sometimes at the expense of press freedom and public interest. And when ownership is concentrated, failure of one operator or geopolitical tension, the thing I mentioned we didn’t have very much of at the moment, can lead to severe disruptions. It’s important to remember that news organisations often depend on real-time global access to sources, feeds, witnesses and correspondence. And concentration makes the system itself more vulnerable to things like cable cuts, political sanctions or regulatory capture, and corporate decisions driven by profit, not by public interest. The consequences for democracy could be profound. As ownership concentrates, local and regional news media struggles. Their dependence on infrastructure and platforms controlled by distant actors undermines their ability to serve their communities and hold local power to account. It used to be possible. You may not be able to hold national power to account until there’s an election, but you used to be able to hold local power to account simply because you had all the news and information and you could turn up at your council offices and shout at them a lot. Homogenised content and diminished local reporting weakens the public’s ability to scrutinise those in power, leading to less informed citizens and diminished political participation. And of course, there are threats to pluralism. With fewer independent actors, the diversity of perspective shrinks. Minority voices are marginalised. Communities, marginalised communities are marginalised and risk being excluded from conversation. So, the challenges require a multi-pronged approach, of course, and I’ve no doubt we’re going to talk about that some when we get to the panel. It may be that the traditional tools for limiting media concentration are not appropriate or don’t work anymore. They’re certainly broken down in the mainstream media. The rules used to be you couldn’t own a newspaper and a television channel. No, not anymore. Policy should encourage a diverse ecosystem of infrastructure providers and media organisations. Policy is important. How you set it is obviously also important, but that’s another conversation. And infrastructure owners need to be held to high standards of transparency regarding their control over data flows and so on. And we should be investing in alternative infrastructure, community-owned networks, independent hosting and decentralised platforms are all within our own control if we choose to take that control. It’s a fundamental challenge to the freedom, diversity and resilience of our news media. And if it’s left unchecked, it risks entrenching new forms of gatekeeping, undermining local journalism and narrowing the spectrum of voices that sustain our democracy. But that said, it was ever thus. It might sound as if I’m suggesting we’re headed towards the end of a diverse media or the death of local news or a single point of control of our news. And I don’t believe that we are. Press barons have forever tried to manipulate what we read. If you look at the relatively recent fight between Prince Harry and Rupert Murdoch’s news media and his case for which he sued them, he won front page news in lots of newspapers, but bizarrely in the Murdoch press, a small article on the bottom of page eight. But the point is that Murdoch, the Murdoch press didn’t have the power, despite the fact that it owns an awful lot of the media, to suppress the story. There are more opportunities today also for citizen journalists than there have ever been. And I think we’re taking advantage of them. Part of the challenge, of course, is it’s not always journalism. Sometimes it’s just rhetoric. But above all else, we should never underestimate the resilience of us humans and our desire to be heard. I started out by asking you to imagine your favourite news network had vanished. Well, that’s not something some people need to imagine. It has happened in several countries over the last 10 to 15 years, where the government has attempted to switch off the population’s access to news. And what happens when that happens? Our own resilience kicks in. In one particular case, by folks heading up to their attics and dusting off their old modems and connecting to the world of news with two rubber caps and the soundscape of squeaks and buzzes over the good old-fashioned telephone. Even so, the choices we make today about the digital arteries of our society will shape the future of news for expression and democratic participation for generations to come. It’s our collective responsibility, policy makers, industry leaders, journalists and citizens alike, to ensure that the infrastructure of the internet serves the public good and not just private power. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to the panel discussion.

Helle Sjovaag: Thank you very much, Chris, for that. Our next keynote speaker is Anja Schifrin. Anja is the Director of the Technology, Media and Communications Program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She has a PhD from the University of Navarra on the topic of online disinformation, and she has published extensively on journalism’s sustainability, capture and policies to support journalism globally. Anja is also a former journalist. She’s been covering both Asia and Europe as a reporter for many years. So, Anja, the floor is yours.

Anya Schiffrin: Great. Thank you all for inviting me and Hayley for organizing this. Can everybody hear me okay? Good, and I’m going to time myself because I have 15 minutes, but if I have to skip, I’m happy to send my talk to you later. It’s really great to see old friends here like Pamela and Guy and Rasmus and make some new friends too, and thank you to UNESCO for all the support over the years. I’m going to be depressing. I’m from Columbia University and I’m an American, so I’m extremely worried right now. We’re in a terrifying moment, one in which it feels like everything we’ve worked to build over decades is being dismantled. Not for any good reason, not because thoughtful people who share the values of an educated or equal society built on truth and science and scientific inquiry decided it was time to carefully consider how to make the world more fair, more just, provide services more efficiently. I’m referring to Doge, of course. No, everything we’ve worked for and believe in is being torn apart by autocrats because they can do it. They came to power because they had support from oligarchs and corporations with money enough to influence political processes. They had the support of frustrated voters who were variously angry about income inequality, wokeism, and migration. And in the US, as well as in other countries, these new leaders use every method they have to grab and hold power, define courts and institutions, civil service, and civil society. So now we’re here trying to figure out what to do next. As usual, the media is on the front lines. Journalists believe that they’re the guardians of truth and their work holds power to account. They work in local communities covering local news, institutions, and politicians. And they work across borders exposing massive global problems. They provide new information to change hearts and minds and be acted on by responsible government that want to act. Quality information is even more important now in an age of AI. Slop, where the information ecosystem is awash in misleading images and strange blah words that sound like they mean something but don’t. Public discourse has been totally debased in the U.S. Our leaders lie without compunction. They seem to lie on every topic, whether migration or vaccines or climate. They attack and they defame their opponents. They did what they did in the McCarthy era when they attacked the Voice of America and librarians burned and pulped books in the U.S. overseas. What comes after this attack on science and academia? Confusion. Nathan Heller’s New Yorker piece last November summed up the U.S. today. It’s no longer the micro-targeted online disinformation that’s the problem, but the general miasma of confusion. As he said, it’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention. Worse is the terrifying public violence, the assassination in Minnesota, the people bringing their cars to protest to either crash into protesters or threaten them, not once but repeatedly. It’s all reminding me of the French sociologist Gabriel Tardé, who I teach in my class at Columbia. He talks about life before the public. Without the public, what did we have in the Middle Ages? Fairs, pilgrimages, tumultuous multitudes dominated by bias or belligerent emotions, angers or panic. Sounds like today. I won’t go into all the details that we all know so well about what happened to quality news media, the collapse of the business models, IP and content stolen by social media, changes in audience consumption patterns, loss of advertising revenue captured by the state, the spread of news deserts. Rasmus will talk to you about trust. I’m sure COVID-19 hitting advertising. advertising. Quality information is a public good, as my husband’s been saying for decades, and few want to pay the full cost of production and dissemination. And that’s true of course of art, culture, health, and many other essentials. So here, but there’s a cost to not producing public goods and we are paying that price now. So here we are in 2025, Trump and Musk decided to cut funding for journalism around the world, Voice of America, startups in Africa, exile media from Russia and Ukraine, the intermediary organizations. It’s a bloodbath ripping through the ecosystem. Some, such as Gina Neff and Taylor Owen, are saying that we need to have new regulatory frameworks. As the previous speaker pointed out, much of what we’ve done may not be enforceable in the future. Others like Reddy and Glacier have said we have to prepare for systems collapse. And they lay out in a recent paper in, I think it was in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, different options for funders, whether it’s protecting communities, blocking the worst parts, or being creative and willing to transform and fundamentally reimagine the sectors surrounded, supported by foundations and under attack. Since we’re talking today about platform dependency and the material conditions for a free and resilient news media, I want to talk about where I think those discussions are going and what I’m hearing around the world. I first want to acknowledge that there has been a tremendous amount of creative thinking already. I strongly disagree with the view that journalists didn’t innovate, that they spent too much time blaming the platforms. I think that journalists and donors have spent decades promoting engagement with audiences, supporting local news, trying to communicate and build trust with communities. They’ve innovated in endless ways, trying the subscription model, community building models, trying to earn income to replace what was lost to the tech advertising monopoly, governments in many countries, including Norway, have done a huge amount to support public interest news. So I don’t think this is a moment when we all need to sit around and criticize ourselves. I think we’ve done enough of that. The time is action. There’s been also, let me point out, tremendous engagement with the platforms. Attempts have been made to create voluntary codes of conduct, require data transparency, work together to develop new forms of technology and income stream, and it was only when those attempts were not sufficient that governments stepped in and tried to help publishers. The good news is we have the tools. Governments tried first with voluntary measures, but they know how to do tax policy and they know how to regulate monopolies. Many, especially in this part of the world, have done a terrific job supporting public broadcasting and journalism. But when government has tried to use their powers to tax and legislate, they were met with platform resistance. The platforms have shown themselves to be bad actors in many cases. I have a little list. They have polluted the information ecosystem by making money from spreading misinformation and hate speech. They steal intellectual property and by stealing it, they weaken the ability of those who want to provide good information to be able to do it. They’ve become monopoly capitalists and they have stifled innovation. They’ve engaged in tax avoidance despite reaping enormous profits from their monopoly power. The oligarchs heading these firms have used their wealth to interfere with the political process and written the rules in the U.S. to benefit themselves, their monopolies, and they’ve done the same things in countries around the world. They have not respected attempts to get them to pay for IP copyright. Their playbook was and is the U.S. classic corporate playbook for lobbying, PR efforts, spreading misinformation about laws, commissioning research. and threatening exit, and I have a book chapter that I wrote with Felipe Lauritzen coming out next year that looks at South Africa and Brazil as case studies for this classic American corporate playbook in tech. So, some regulators, I’m thinking here of Rod Sims and the Australian Competition Commission, came to realize that the heart of the problem is platform dominance and power asymmetries between platforms and publishers. This is why in Australia it was the competition authorities rather than the copyright office that tried to get platform remuneration for publishers. The Australian case is significant because it led to payments by Google and Meta along with a raft of measures enacted by government which helped shore up declining local news. But we saw what happened in Canada when they adopted a similar law. Meta responded by dropping news, which caused a collapse in website traffic. We saw in Brazil how Google lobbied against similar laws. South Africa, and in California, and all over Europe, dropping news as a test. And now we have yesterday’s announcement from Google that they’re also going to pull out of many of the Australian laws. And as always, they blame the victim. Oh, it’s the Labour Party’s fault for not being clear. Anyway, my point is that the platform intransigence has led regulators to consider a host of new measures. Late 2024, Australia announced that platforms that didn’t want to negotiate with publishers could pay a digital levy, which would be more expensive than what bargaining code payments would be. South Africa is also looking at digital levies. And many countries are considering things like digital services taxes with funding earmarked for journalism. I don’t want to go over time, but I’ll just say a few things. So, in the OSCE, we have this report coming out on platform dependencies and publishers, which we’re presenting in September and October. And we talk about must-carry and visibility policies. This, I think, is a big issue. is a very dramatic shift, and I’m not sure that much of it would actually even be implementable in the U.S. because of First Amendment considerations, which preclude compelled speech. But I think there’s two things to remember. One is, had the platforms agreed to previous laws and attempts, we would not be in this position where we’re now looking at really what I consider fourth-best measures. And the only way to get concessions from platforms is to proceed with legislative proposals, otherwise they do not act. I think that the next frontier is going to have to be some sort of AI tax, possibly with funding given to support journalism, and I see four policy options. Free-for-all, where the LLM AI companies can scrape whatever they want online, and creators and publishers have no protection. This is what we saw during the training period. The second path would be one in which there is a strict policy of no use of intellectual property. This is clearly unrealistic. So now we have two options which involve paying for the use of IP. One would be a fixed scale of fees that are predetermined. Payments to pharma companies during periods of compulsory licensing of medications are one example. The South Africans in the room are very familiar, and India as well, with compulsory licensing regimes. I think, frankly, I’m working on a paper now with a team of economists, and that is what we’re going to be proposing. And then the other point, of course, is more what Australia did, which is you lay out a negotiations framework. And this has to be done because the competitive environment has a direct bearing on negotiations. This was the whole entire point that Australia understood you don’t have fair negotiations when it’s a couple of monopolies that are doing at the table. So I want to be really clear. I’ve got five more minutes. I’ll give back a couple of minutes. updates, I want to be clear about what we’re up against. The US government has made it clear that it opposes both tech regulation and taxation all over the world. There is a proposal in Trump’s current budget to preempt state regulation on AI for 10 years. This is really important, because in the US, we have federal systems, so states do quite a lot. And if they’re not able to regulate AI for 10 years, we have a huge problem on our hands. Another thing is, I don’t know if you’ve heard about the revenge tax. This is a provision in the new budget which would punish companies in countries that try to enforce the OECD tax agreement on global minimum corporate taxes, which you may remember was settled at 15%, which is pretty low, or impose digital services taxes. So this is the US saying, we’re taxing you back if you do either of these things. Now, the funny thing about this, the revenge tax is such a bad idea that the US business community has hired lobbyists to try to kill it. That’s amazing, if US business doesn’t even want a law that’s supposed to protect them. And the New York Times had a great article about this last week. So let’s make no mistake about what’s happening in the US. Trump and his friends oppose misinformation research and legislation because they like to lie online. Trump and Vance and their Silicon Valley allies oppose paying for IP because that would eat into their profit. That’s what’s happening here. Let’s not muddy the waters with talking about First Amendment or anything else. So here’s the question. Can Europe stick together? In the US, those of us who care about this stuff want to know whether the EU and the rest of the world will cave, capitulate, or whether it will stick with its plans to tax and regulate big tech. India has apparently agreed to roll back its 6% tax. attacks on digital advertising. There’s also discussion, including a head of financing for development meeting in Seville next week, where I’ll be going, about whether having the US out of global discussions is better, because it means the rest of the world can go on with making their own plans. Normally, what the US does is their negotiators demand concessions to international frameworks. They drag out the discussions. And they were then, in the end, after dragging out, wasting everyone’s time, watering down, they just refused to sign, because Congress won’t pass it anyway. So I don’t think the EU and the rest of the world and the international community has any choice. Either the US is isolationist and out of the picture for the long term, in which case the rest of the world has to move ahead in all sorts of areas without us, or the US returns to sanity, in which case it’s good to have spent a few years developing smart policies, and the US can catch up later. Thank you for including me, and I look forward to the discussions. Thank you.

Helle Sjovaag: Thank you for that, Anja. I’m going to introduce the panel now. Our panel today consists of five distinguished actors working in the areas of policy, industry, and academia. First, we have Pamela Sitoni. She’s a Kenyan journalist and author. She’s a media and communications consultant and the public editor at Nation Media Group in Kenya. She’s previously served as executive editor and managing editor of Daily Nation, the East African, and Standard newspapers in Kenya. She has also worked as a communications specialist for the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, in Kenya. Pamela. Gustav Röhm is CEO. Tineus Trust and she’s the chair of the board of Shipstead Media. She has a background as a journalist and editor and she served as the general secretary of the Norwegian Press Association and chair of the latest Norwegian Freedom of Expression Commission. We have Rasmus Claes Nielsen. He is a professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the study of journalism, where he also served as director of research for many years. He’s published extensively on political communication, the business of news, platform dependency and misinformation and he is co-author of the annual Reuters Institute digital news report. Annine Kjærhølf is a Norwegian lawyer and associate professor of constitutional law at the University of Oslo. She’s a special advisor to the Norwegian Human Rights Institution. Annine has served as legal advisor to the Council of Europe and she served as chair of the Commission of Academic Freedom of Expression here in Norway. Tarfik Djelassi is the assistant director general for communications and information at UNESCO. He has a PhD in information systems from New York University and he served as minister of higher education, scientific research and information and communication technologies in Tunisia. He’s also professor of strategy and technology management at IND Lusanne. And we also have on stage our two keynote speakers Anja Schifrin and Chris Despain and Tarfik is joining us now. Okay, welcome to the panel everyone. We’ll start with the section on reactions to our two keynote presentations I think. I want to start maybe with you Rasmus. Chris tells this story of a concentration in the internet sector and he draws this line back to the press barons in a sense. Do you think it’s a good parallel? Is it the same old story? I mean I think I’m

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: reminded of the quote from the movie Casablanca that he is like other men only more so. I think it is the same old story even only much more pronounced in that the concentration of power we see today is increasingly transnational even global and and that is a more accentuated than the history that Chris rightly outlined. I also think it’s important to keep in mind that in addition to the sort of corporate story of triumph and tragedy that we all know so well the sort of the animal spirits of the market and they have been quite animalistic that have been unleashed in these areas. There’s also a political story that I think Chris gestured towards when you mentioned sort of privatization of water for example utilities but also the watering down of cross-media ownership legislation and I think if we want to understand where we are today it’s important to pay attention to the current inhabitant of the White House but also the history of this. The moment we’re in today I think has a political history that goes back at least to George W Bush and the Barack Obama administration to the Blair prime ministership and the David Cameron prime ministership to Chancellor Schroeder and to Chancellor Merkel in terms of a long period in which corporate consolidation, liberalization opening up media markets have not only been accepted but endorsed and wholeheartedly pursued by establishment political parties of both the center-left and the center-right. So for example here is a quote, our companies have created the internet, expanded it, perfected it in ways that other countries can’t compete. And oftentimes what is portrayed as high-minded positions and issues, sometimes it’s just a sign to carve out some of their own commercial interests. This is not a quote from the current inhabitant of the White House, this is a quote from President Obama from 2015. So there’s a political story here of deliberate non-intervention and deregulation that is across the political spectrum and across the Atlantic. And in fact, if we are to believe what we read in the press today, the brief of the current European Commission is not to respond to the hopes of many people who attend events like this. It is allegedly deregulation, corporate consolidation, and apparently if what we’re told today by the Wall Street Journal about the possibility of pausing enforcement of the DSA for US companies, it’s to make geopolitical concessions in the interest of maintaining some sort of tie across the Atlantic. So I think there is a very important political story here. If we want to understand who is responsible for where we are today, and I think that should probably inform as to what we hope from the same actors going forward.

Helle Sjovaag: Thank you. Annina, do you think we’re too late in regulating this space? How would you describe the current challenges to the information, ecology, and human rights?

Anine Kierulf: Yeah, I very much agree with Rasmus. We’re certainly too late. But in some ways, I think lawyers’ law is always too late. We’re sort of trailing the world. The world goes on, and we run after it and try and regulate it and mend all the things that don’t work with regulations. And that’s the way that law works generally, and it’s been like that in the meeting of all new technologies and even like, I don’t know, cars, everything. But the situation today is very different because the world is spinning a lot faster, so it’s hard to trail. The internet is fast. The technology companies are really fast. Everything’s going at a much higher pace. reaching out to a number of more people a lot faster than in any previous ways of technology, I think. And so law is trailing the world, but democracy is by its nature slow. And that’s to try and get people involved and listen to what the constituents have to say about things. Obviously, we have to do that. But seeing a model for regulation that incorporates that slowness into the pace that the world is working with today, I think is very, very difficult. So the challenges to free speech, obviously, but particularly perhaps freedom of information. I mean, the big internet revolution, obviously, it’s where all people get to speak freely about what they want, where they want, in some ways, at least on the mercy of big tech companies. But the big difference, I think, with internet and even before social media is the absolute overflow of unchecked information. So the model that we’ve sort of been relating to up until the internet came is one where some fact checkers, some quality checkers, some guardians have always sort of filtered the information that we get. And that’s so very different today. And it’s really hard to envision how to meet that even with more training in digital literacy and critical thinking. It’s very hard to keep up because we as human beings are netizens are also a lot slower than the machines are going right now.

Helle Sjovaag: Yeah. So regulation is usually reactionary, right? And politics is usually national and these systems are global, in a sense. So Anja paints a kind of a bleak picture. of where we are today, I want to ask you, Pamela, what do you think about Anja’s warning that we shouldn’t rely on the US to regulate this space? How has this dependency felt in the African context?

Pamella Sittoni: Thank you, and thank you, Anja, for that wonderful presentation. I couldn’t agree with you more in terms of the rest of the world really looking at America’s opposition to regulation, America’s opposition to taxation of these media tech companies, and thinking about a solution that includes everybody else. I think for me, my question would be the how to go about it because when you look at Africa’s situation, for example, we find ourselves in a situation where we can’t really have the bargaining power against these companies. We look at a company like Google or Meta, and if they pulled out of Africa, what difference would it make to their bottom line? Obviously none, but what impact would it have on the information flow in that part of the world? A great impact. So we find ourselves kind of in a catch-22 situation, and I think I would look at what Chris said about policies and also about creating an ecosystem where these companies are actually made to play by a global playbook and not specific rules for specific countries. So what Google does in Australia, it should also be compelled to do the same in Africa. And also we have had situations where these companies are allowed to pick and choose. They pick and choose who to work with, which media house to work with, who to pay and how much to pay. So this call for accountability and transparency, I think should. be made to apply globally and not in specific regions only. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for that.

Kjersti Loken Stavrum: Kjersti, from a sort of an industry perspective, how real is this power relief felt in the industry? What are the threats to freedom of information? I think it was two great keynotes. I think what we see in my opinion is that social media or the platforms, they are amplifying the weaknesses of the society in way where they operate. So when we see this polarization in the US, it was there already. Like in the Philippines, where Maria Ressa always had strong and clear messages from. The Philippines were never a good place before Facebook either. But I guess at least we in this room share this mission of trying to foster a well-informed and enlightened public debate. And depending on the problem, the answer is almost always trusted media, trusted edited media. And at this very moment, actually, VG, Norway’s major private free media outlet, is celebrating its 80th anniversary. So the Prime Minister is there. I should have been there myself, but I’m here. Anyway, that makes it possible for me to tell you that VG has in a population of 5 million people, daily 2 million visitors, and 1.5 million comes directly to VG. That is both extremely impressive, I think, almost all media outlets in the world. And with them, those figures, isn’t that right, Rasmus? But it is a result of them. They were funded actually after the Second World War as a democracy project. and that project is still going on. They’ve had a very clear policy for what their role was in society and they work on that role very proudly. And I think the, yeah, I agree with Anina also because I agree to all, I guess that is why, that is how Echo Chamber developed. But I think the regulation has been too slow because we had the assumptions wrong. We assumed that the US was an ally for our liberal democracy and now we know for sure that it’s not. So we of course, yeah, it was too late. We didn’t treat the challenges seriously enough but we are doing it now, I think. And I think we more and more see parallel to what we saw in the 1990s when the climate policy also understood that the polluter had to pay. So we are sort of copying the polluter pays principle that was established back then. And I think that has, of course, both an economic aspect but it’s likewise important that it has a moral aspect of it. And I think that’s fair because we see that when not accountable platforms are spreading pollution into our information climate, there are someone else that are left to clean up the mess and very often that is the edited media. And I think that to make the polluter pay, I think we can enforce those that are edited and those that are responsible. And like, for instance, VG, they adhere to the Norwegian. media responsibility law and and also is part of a very beautiful press ethical system that Norway has and the Nordics share almost likewise that I think is of great importance but but in the end we cannot sort of be lame-duck facing those that are not playing by the rules that we others are it’s not more complicated than that you’re talking about some very clear institutional

Helle Sjovaag: differences I guess between the two sectors how fake how is UNESCO working to to ensure that we have a free information space in the context of the keynotes that we hear today thank you Hele first of all my thanks to both

Tawfik Jelassi: keynote speakers because I think that they set the stage very carefully and thoroughly and they were very eloquent in putting the arguments forward I am tempted to add to the title it’s not only conditions for a free and resilient news media but also for a trustworthy news media to pick on the previous panelist who brought up the issue of trust and the previous panelist also mentioned Maria Ressa and her famous quote she said without facts there is no truth and without truth there is no trust and without trust there is no shared reality upon which we can act today we do have a new shared reality and as it was mentioned before it’s caused us to act so what UNESCO has done three years ago it has launched a major global initiative called for an internet of trust which was an inclusive multi-stakeholder process involving not only the 194 member states of UNESCO but also civil society organizations tech companies, platform operators, academia, research, technical community, organizing free global open consultations, receiving 10,000 inputs from these stakeholders, inputs coming from over 134 countries. And what I have in my hand here is a booklet published about a year ago. It’s called the UNESCO Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms. And it calls or it spills out the conditions for a free, resilient, trustworthy media, clearly defining the responsibility in terms of transparency, accountability, user empowerment, independent regulators and oversight bodies. Why doing that? Because I don’t think the why is clear and the what is clear. But the how today is the challenge. How to go about it? And we believe that regulation showed its limits. Self-regulation did not work, did not deliver. We need maybe a core regulatory system, which is truly multi-stakeholder. And that was our base. And to anchor the process in human rights standards, because it’s also about individual dignity. It’s about data privacy. It is about the user empowerment, as I said a minute ago. So the good news is that we are now implementing these guidelines. We have pilot implementation underway. We set up a network of 80 regulators from all over the world. And we had last year the first UNESCO Global Conference for Regulatory Authorities. Why we need them? Because, of course, they can contextualize these guidelines and they can, of course, take into account, and they have to, the specificities of regions and countries when implementing these set of principles. So this is an effort. But again, I stress the multi-stakeholder. the multilateral, the inclusive process, because what some of you mentioned is a problem for society at large. And there is no one single country or actor who can tackle this issue successfully. We need to join forces to achieve our goal.

Helle Sjovaag: Thank you. So, Anja, how you kind of outline where the US is now, sort of isolationist. What’s your hope or belief in these sort of global systems? Is it going to work if the US isn’t able to, or willing to collaborate, to pull out, as you say?

Anya Schiffrin: Well, I think it’s, and I know we talked about this during the South African hearings, it’s very normal for companies to threaten to exit. That is what they always do. And I understand, I’ve heard so many people in Africa say what Pamela is saying. In terms of economics, the exit threat really makes no sense, because these companies make money off news and quality information. And even if they had to share some of the surplus, they would still be making plenty of profit, right? So, it makes no sense to exit. I think sort of three things. One is clearly, as Pamela pointed out, countries and publishers have to negotiate collectively. The Danish example is really important. So, Kenya by itself might not feel like a good market, but all of Africa is a market. So that’s the first thing. Second thing is, let’s be realistic. If these companies exit, Chinese technology will take over. So, TikTok or whoever will just take on this job. So, there is actually an alternative and those platforms know that. And then finally… eventually other countries would develop their own technology. So, you know, Indonesian telecom, Brazil, South Africa, there would be more innovation later. And I’m not, as I mentioned before, you know, none of these options are great options, but that’s where we’re at.

Helle Sjovaag: Yeah. Chris, it seems like most of the panel agree with you. Are you disappointed? You’re assuming I agree with myself. Care to disagree with yourself?

Chris Disspain: I do think, sorry, I do think that we need to be a little bit careful about what we say. I’ve heard everyone, most people talking about regulation. Different people hear different things when you say regulation. Is that better? Lovely. If the Chinese government hears regulation, it means something completely different to when Tavik was talking about regulation, with him I agree, because he was talking about multi-stakeholder regulation, or what I would call policy, global policy that can be implemented around the world. And I think there’s quite a danger in talking about regulation because it feeds into the narrative of some of the more authoritarian governments around the world. What we need is global policy. And what we need is the good guys, and I’m not going to say who I think the good guys are, but the good guys need to actually buy into the global multi-stakeholder way of making policy. And what that means is that you have to take the good with the bad. It means that you’re not going to win every argument. And what you can’t do, if you are a government, is if you don’t win something, pick up your bucket and spade and go home and create your own laws to make it happen. And there’s a tendency for that to be happening right now in certain places around the world, not a million miles from where we are today. So what I would say is, yes, I do agree. that we need to figure out ways of Making sure that we maintain the diversity we maintain an open and free resilient media But but just by saying we probably need to regulate isn’t isn’t going to cut it I just want to say one other thing which is that we We do have Open resilient media it does exist around the world It’s not everywhere, but it does exist it exists in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia exists in the jolly old BBC It’s been with me all my life and and is and and wins as independent because everyone hates it And that’s a key point if everyone is equally unhappy if when when the left is in government They think the BBC is right-wing when the right is in government. They’d be they think the BBC is left-wing That’s how you do it, and it does work But of course they’re under threat to you because of the funding model not because Google owns an undersea platform But because of the funding model and how’s that going to work? So this is a much bigger problem. I think than just Those you know ownership of stuff and as I knew said if if Google or Microsoft or that lot can own Undersea cables then the Chinese will come and put them in and so on and so forth And then there’s even more of a challenge one final thing which is We get an awful lot of stuff for free We there is except it isn’t of course free, and I’m reminded of a conversation with Tim Berners-Lee. Sorry to name-drop when When was the agreement that we would get free access to? Everything that’s on the internet and a free email account that we can use completely freely And we wouldn’t have to pay anything for that at all when did that happen? It never did there was always a price. Thanks

Helle Sjovaag: Can we get back to just the issue of trust a little bit because Shasti you talked a little bit about this and and about resilience and the power of these companies and the discrepancies between the institutional ethics of journalism and technology companies on the other side. What do you think the media can do to counter these dependencies or is there any way to work together in a very competitive space? What’s the future here?

Kjersti Loken Stavrum: Well maybe my answer can start by addressing Chris’s sort of warning against regulation or thinking of and using the word regulation because everything that we’re discussing has these dilemmas and what seems bright from a democracy perspective is black when you go to Turkey and then it is the opposite if you are Erdogan and hear the lovely word of anti-terror law then he will just run out and find another journalist that maybe has assaulted him. So that is the dilemma but at this time I still think that we need to take care of our own geographies so that not more and more are sort of sliding into a situation which is not bearable and very difficult to handle. That was the start but I do think that we should talk about ethics because ethic is of such an extreme importance and I think it’s interesting for instance since we’re sitting here in Oslo to see what the Nordics has in common. All the Finland, Sweden, Norway and to some extent Denmark has this brilliant press ethical system. I think the Danish is a little bit different because it’s the Ministry of Justice that appoints the press council but in the other countries it’s independent. If I have one dream it would be that the media in all the geographies that are natural to divide for instance Europe into, come together and establish a free, fair and fast press ethical system, because that makes everything so much easier. And it’s it’s a it’s a fast lane towards trust, I think, because then you can you can complain, you over years, you will you will see that media that adhere to a press ethical system, they, they comply, and they they feel part of holding up the the standards, like, like take a very, very easy example is that how often do you think that the Norwegian media has published a story that have been criticized in the press council for revealing people’s privacy, private life, it hardly never happened.

Helle Sjovaag: I mean, you have a comment.

Anine Kierulf: No, I just wanted to add on to what just said, and what Chris says is true, because keeping that that local perspective, even while looking at the world, going backwards, I think is very important. And also, both to sort of be examples for, for other regions, obviously, but also to sort of remind ourselves what is really at stake here, and how far we can really get with regulations, no matter what kinds of regulations we’re talking about. Because if you see, like some of the backsliding in the US now, is really following the books of the law that digging up like really old statutes from the 1700s, and so forth, but but you’re using laws as a pretext for doing what is absolutely contrary to both the rule of law and to democracy. So it takes really sort of good faith constitutionalism for that to work. And I think the same applies in this sector, you would have to have sort of a good faith approach to all of this stuff. And, and in that respect, I think the the ethic dimension comes in to be really important.

Helle Sjovaag: Yeah, and you’re thinking both at the sort of local, national, and global level. So, because Pamela was talking about issues of accountability and transparency, how do you think we achieve that at these different levels? Is it a global question, or can we work nationally, locally for that? Yes, Pamela, please.

Pamella Sittoni: I think it has to be both. So, at the local level, as the panelist who spoke before me has mentioned, it’s important that we have regulations or ethical guidelines that guide us. And I think this is really, for what we call legacy media, it’s a no-brainer. We all operate within the tenets of good journalism. The issue really is that the platforms are open for anybody and everybody, and there’s disinformation and misinformation. In fact, I always look at this as the flip side to that is that then the credible media have a chance to forge more trust with their audiences because they are the to-go-to platforms, and people will go there for what they believe to be factual, and so, therefore, they have to operate within the rules. But when I was talking about accountability and transparency for the big platforms, I mean, we’re just looking at issues of even how they work out their algorithms, which they do not disclose. They decide, as Chris said, they can decide what information to put out there and what to censor based on their relationships with government. They can endanger lives. I think the most current story from Kenya, where I come from right now, is about a young man who put out something on X, and it displeased a high-ranking police official. And because of that, he was literally, he was arrested and he was murdered in the police cells because this information was made available, was revealed by the platform. And they were able to track him down and actually arrest him, and then he was murdered in the police cells. So when you’re talking about these issues, it’s life-threatening, it threatens the rights of the people to expression, the freedom of expression, even to freedom to just be alive. So these are serious issues, and it’s important that we look at the best way to have that accountability and to hold platforms accountable for what they do. And then the other issue is the whole issue of media sustainability. I’m happy to see that in Europe, most countries actually, the media is funded by states, but in places like Africa, where independent media used to rely on a business model that has now collapsed. Transition to digital media has become very slow and painful, and it affects the quality of the journalism, it affects how much information, how they can do their stories, how they cannot do, for example, deep investigative stories for lack of funding. And it’s all because of how the whole ecosystem is owned by somebody who can decide how much money they can pay you for your content. They can take your IP for no pay, and you literally have nowhere to go. We have a case right now where Mitai is arguing on whether it should be sued in Kenya or not, and because they don’t have physical offices in Kenya, and yet they continue to violate the IP of Kenyans. or Kenyan organizations. So I think the whole governance in that space is very important.

Anya Schiffrin: Can I come in, Hayley, with an add on? You know what my husband is now saying is that the platforms need to post a billion dollar bond before they start operations in countries like Kenya or Brazil, so that when there’s a fine, they have to pay it. Because in too many places, they’re going around saying, we don’t have staff. So let them put down a bond or a deposit, and then they can be fined.

Helle Sjovaag: Yeah, like a rainy day fund. Is sovereignty a word we can use here? And is data sovereignty, digital sovereignty, is that a path?

Anine Kierulf: Well, we wish, I suppose. It would be nice if we had our own ecosystems and our own infrastructure for taking care of our own data and our own information. But it seems that’s a little way ahead. I think it would be very important to think like that. And we’re obviously totally lagging behind, was that, I think it was Timothy Garton Ash, in his 10 Principles of Free Speech, he was talking about the dogs and the cats and the mice. So the dogs are the states, and the mice are us. And the cats are the big tech companies in between, who obviously don’t obey by any rules and do whatever they like. And so that’s kind of the situation where we’re in, only that some of the big dogs are teaming up with some of the big cats. And that leaves us a lot more vulnerable than we’ve been up to now. So I think there’s no way outside of thinking sovereignty. I’m not a technologist, so I have no idea how that would actually be able to work out in practice. And I sometimes miss in conversations like this, not like this one, but conversations on this topic, is that people who are interested in freedom and journalism and democracy and human rights are not always talking so much to the technologists and vice versa, so that if we could team up in a way that informed us both better, maybe that could be at least one step ahead in that direction.

Helle Sjovaag: Well, we’re here at IDF, so maybe. I want to ask Rasmus about alternatives in a minute, but Chris and Kjersti have asked for comments, so Chris?

Chris Disspain: Just a couple of things I wanted to say, just on the digital sovereignty thing. The challenge with that is, does it work unless you try and go extra territorially? That’s a really difficult thing. The European Commission continues to attempt to regulate various parts of the domain name system extra territorially, and it’s a real challenge, because it simply basically doesn’t work. But the thing I wanted to pick up on was what Pamela was talking about, because she gave a really good example about the ethics of revealing someone’s name, and in therein lies the real challenge, because there are the ethical judgment in some cases, the good ethical judgment in some cases will be you should reveal, and the bad ethical judgment in some cases will be you should reveal. So it’s really, really hard to figure out a way through that, because at the end of the day, it’s not you should reveal or you shouldn’t, it’s what are the circumstances, and that by definition depends on your definition of who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. I just wanted to start with me, I have that cat

Kjersti Loken Stavrum: and it’s absolutely ignorant to all the rules. You say you have a big tech company? Well, I definitely have, it’s a cat. But let’s build on that one, because I think we have no choice. We need to develop national digital infrastructure. No, I mean, what we see around us, leaves us no other choice. And, and I think we have in Norway, for instance, Telenor working on cloud storage, extremely important. We have some huge media companies like shipstead where I’m board head and and I think the policymakers need to to find out how can how does this 2025 going onward media policy look like it should facilitate tech development, it should make it it should be as broad as possible so that it sort of communicates with the framework of the free press in the world we live today. That will leave the media free and not so vulnerable to changes in the in the policymaking but but but sort of leveling the playing field with this big ignorant cats.

Helle Sjovaag: Yeah. Asmus, do you think that’s an option to build public alternatives?

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: Of course it is. I mean, there are plenty of options. But I think the the real question is, we need to hold people in positions of power, including public and political power to account in terms of how they understand the system and whether they act accordingly. And I think the question here is, when looking at dependence on US American, big commercial platform companies, is which part of that phrase you stress, right? So if you think the problem is that they’re US American, then the path you pursue is obvious, it is that you try to create national or in the case of Europe, regional champions. And then when they have the right passport, and you are reliant on grande technologie, rather than big tech, things are fine, right? Because then those companies have the whole into a different set of politicians and then let’s just hope that whoever is the next inhabitant of the LSA is not going to abuse that power the way that we see in some other cases. And then the question is whether we as the mice can expect very different behavior from large corporations who hold different passports and I think that all of those of you have been at the receiving end of European capitalism around the world I think you will ask yourself whether you really think it’s fundamentally different from US American capitalism. Then the second way to think about the problem is that the problem is that they are big. Now then the alternatives are also I think quite clear. You’re thinking about decentralized, federated, open-source solutions. Now I think it needs to be very clear that very few people in positions of power seem to think this is the problem because if they did they would pursue those alternatives already because they exist like the Fediverse right with Mastodon or Lieber office. There are options in this space and we have now 25 years of revealed preference from people in positions of power this is not what they want. So those alternatives exist but they are not being pursued. And finally of course your analysis might be that the problem is that they are commercial and that’s where we can turn to the possibility of public service alternatives and I think it’s possible to do this. It’s not easy. We need to decide what are they going to do. You know there are many layers of the stack one could look at. How are they going to be funded? This is not going to be cheap. Who’s going to make the rules and who’s going to enforce them? Like all the controversies we see around content moderation decisions imagine those only with the politicians in your country of origin making the decisions rather than Mark Zuckerberg and his oversight board. So it’s not easy but it can certainly be done. The question then is a question of priorities right? In Europe alone we spend an estimated 40 billion euros a year on public service media. That has been stagnant in some cases declining in recent years but we could make investments of a similar size. Europe is a 20 trillion US dollar GDP region. Public spending in Europe alone is 10 trillion euros a year. It’s a question of priorities and that’s why I think we really need to be clear about, you know, if we are to pursue the route that Christie endorsed, you know, we have the means. It’s a question of choices.

Helle Sjovaag: Yes, exactly. Tawfiq, did you have a comment?

Tawfik Jelassi: Yes, the issue of ethics was brought up by a couple of panelists earlier and the question was, well, the statement was that the media needs to adhere to ethical standards and norms, but the question is, are these local national ethics standards or are these global? I would say I think it’s both because technology and the platforms are global by nature, are borderless, therefore you cannot only apply national policy or approach to it. And here I wanted to flag out a piece of work that UNESCO has done, which is the recommendation on the ethics of artificial intelligence, which was approved by all 193 member states back in 2021, and the set of principles, including on the media, including on freedom of expression, including on access to information, within this ethics of AI recommendation, are currently being implemented in over 70 countries, 70, 70 countries worldwide. So again, we have a base. I’m not saying that’s the answer to all issues, but there is a base and this is part of the UNESCO work, which is a standard setting, normative instruments in a consensus, multi- stakeholder way. So of course we are not, because some of you mentioned the European Commission and the DSA, etc., UNESCO does not have that executive power, cannot find the bad guys, the bad players, all what it can do is advocacy, norm setting, and trying to help move the needle.

Helle Sjovaag: Well, you brought up artificial intelligence, and I also have that on my notes, how does that development sort of increase or challenge these dependencies? These are many of the same companies… involved in the material internet and also in the AI race. What should we really be prepared for here in terms of how market power develops and ethics and regulation, and also for independent journalism in general? Maybe I can start with you, Pamela.

Pamella Sittoni: Thanks, I think first of all, I strongly believe that any technological advancement, including AI, is good. And it is not mutually exclusive to good journalism. And the core of journalism will always remain, which is to tell stories. AI will not replace journalism, it is not going to replace the way we tell, it might replace how we tell some of our stories, but it will not create stories for us if it’s used responsibly as a tool. And we’ve seen already a lot of media houses are applying AI. But I think for me, it just goes back to that whole control and ownership conversation about the platforms where you have, now you have the tech companies, they own the platforms, they own the distribution network, but they also want to own that content. And I’ll just give the example of the Google AI overview and what it’s doing for media houses already right now, just by gleaning all information about topics and putting it out there for the audience. Media houses have done research and they’ve seen that because of that, the traffic to their own websites reduces significantly. And what that means is therefore that they cannot monetize their own content, they cannot monetize it for advertising either. And eventually I see a vision. a cycle of just doom for both the media houses and even the internet ecosystem. Because the more you starve the media houses of revenue and ability to generate independent verified information, the more you starve the whole ecosystem of this information. So for me, I think the world should be very worried about what these companies are doing with AI and also force them to be ethical or force them to pay for that content. If they are gleaning content from the credible sites, then they need to pay those sites for what they’re generating out of it.

Helle Sjovaag: These are also large global structures that we’re talking about here. And I want to sort of end the panel or come to a discussion about what we can do is maybe small states or the role of small states in this context and maybe start with Rasmus and also ask you, Anja, after that what advice you could give to small states in this context?

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: I mean, I speak as an academic who come from a small state. So I think I’ll wear both hats. And I think as an academic, my finest obligation is to call it as I see it, also when it’s inconvenient or unpopular. And when we think about this from the point of view of small states, perhaps I’m reminded of the quote from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, which we should, of course, remember he didn’t write because he was sort of an inspiring manosphere would-be influencer. He didn’t write this to endorse this. He wrote this as a description of what he saw as the reality of power politics. And I think that is useful to keep in mind if you come from a small country. And as an academic, I would just say I think we need an honest debate, public debate, with politicians taking responsibility for the choices that they’re making. I don’t think my personal views on how elected officials balance between. in the urgency of climate change, of national security, of assuring welfare systems with aging populations, of ensuring a productive economy while also ensuring sustainability, vis-a-vis issues of digital sovereignty and technological autonomy. I don’t think my personal views and how they balance those are particularly interesting. What I will say is I think it’s very important to be clear that even small states, as long as they’re not desperately poor, have power and can make different choices and those choices matter greatly in terms of the outcomes. I don’t think we should accept the sort of pretend helplessness of powerful politicians who that way escape scrutiny and responsibility for the actions that they take. And I don’t think that’s any different from their choices about where they buy their military hardware, how they deal with climate change, how they deal with changes to the welfare system, migration or anything else. So I think there are choices also for small states, at least if they’re not desperately poor and marginalized, which of course some are. And I think we’re seeing some countries exercise those choices. And then we can hope that they will be informed by all the wonderful sentiments that have been expressed at a sort of aspirational palette like this.

Helle Sjovaag: Yeah, so accountability also towards the political system. Anja, did you have a comment?

Anya Schiffrin: Sure, I’m not obviously from a small state unless we count New York, but I think I would absolutely agree with Rasmus. And clearly I’m thinking about when all the island nations got together because of climate change, because they knew they were going to get affected first. I think that there are regional leaders. So I think South Africa and in Nigeria, I think Brazil, I think there’s Indonesia. I think there’s lots of countries out there that can play a role. On taxes, I think it’s been really interesting the push towards. it’s having the UN instead of the OECD. So I think it’s going to have to be collective efforts to tackle a lot of this.

Helle Sjovaag: Anina, is there a balance here between states’ responsibilities and people? What can we do? Oh, the mice? Yeah, the mice.

Anine Kierulf: Well, if you can’t sort of fix the things that threatens you, maybe you can fix how you’re being threatened. So some practice in digital literacy, obviously. And being a teacher myself, but at the university level, I seem to see a shift in students in that their critical thinking is a lot better, which is good, because that’s been sort of a priority, I suppose, but that their knowledge is a lot less. So I think it was Tawfik quoting Maria Ressa saying that without facts, there’s no truth. So just to stick to that part of the quote, I think that’s very important that we, our focus on critical thinking is not sort of going on the cost of thinking about truth and knowledge too, because we need to have some basis for that critical thinking. And I believe that’s really important now. Not just that we learn how these systems and these algorithms are working and how these black boxes are affecting us, but also that we learn more about ourselves and why we’re so vulnerable to this way of manipulation that we’re being subject to right now.

Helle Sjovaag: I think that’s a great way to end the panel. We’re approaching the end of our time. So I’ll make a brief attempt at summarizing and concluding here. So the internet, you know, it’s a material, physical thing that’s made up of cables and servers. They transmit content and it also connects us globally. But the internet is- not ownerless. Somebody actually owns this stuff, and ownership constitutes power. And this power is growing in concentration. So we are already past the point of dependency on the infrastructures that the global technology providers provide. So we have to start asking how resilient our societies really are to maintain healthy information spaces, particularly when we see increasing unrest and crises. So at what point does this dependency actually compromise national sovereignty, national political, and digital and data sovereignties? How do we regulate the space to ensure the conditions for a free and resilient media that actually help to uphold these societies? So I had three thoughts on how to maybe offset these dependency problems. The first would be to keep transparency and accountability at the front of every conversation that we have about private as well as public maintenance of digital infrastructures. Second, to regulate the digital infrastructure to make sure that we have universality, human right, and freedom of expression at the base of every decision. And third, to immediately start building alternatives. So with that, I want to thank our keynote speakers, Anja and Chris, very much for your perspectives today and also to all of our panelists for giving us this rich context. Thank you also to online audiences and you for being here in the room. Thank you.

Agreement points

Internet infrastructure concentration creates vulnerabilities and control points

Speakers

– Chris Disspain
– Helle Sjovaag
– Anya Schiffrin
– Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Arguments

Internet infrastructure is physical, centralized and privately owned, creating choke points that can silence journalism or manipulate public discourse

Media dependency on platforms creates vulnerabilities where outlets can become practically invisible if access is restricted

Platforms have polluted the information ecosystem, stolen intellectual property, become monopoly capitalists, and interfered with political processes

Current concentration resembles historical press baron control but is more pronounced due to transnational and global reach

Summary

All speakers agree that the concentration of internet infrastructure ownership in few hands creates significant vulnerabilities for media freedom and democratic discourse, with power to control information flow at fundamental levels

Topics

Infrastructure | Human rights | Legal and regulatory

Regulation has been too slow and inadequate to address platform power

Speakers

– Anine Kierulf
– Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
– Anya Schiffrin
– Kjersti Loken Stavrum

Arguments

Law is always trailing behind fast-moving technology, and democracy’s inherent slowness makes regulation difficult

There’s a political history of deliberate non-intervention and deregulation across the political spectrum that created current conditions

Platform intransigence and resistance to regulation has led to consideration of more drastic measures like digital levies

Platforms amplify existing societal weaknesses and polarization rather than creating new problems

Summary

Speakers consensus that regulatory responses have been inadequate, with law trailing behind fast-moving technology and political decisions favoring deregulation contributing to current problems

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Development

Need for collective action and global cooperation

Speakers

– Pamella Sittoni
– Anya Schiffrin
– Tawfik Jelassi
– Kjersti Loken Stavrum

Arguments

Countries and publishers need to negotiate collectively rather than individually to have bargaining power against platforms

Rest of the world must move ahead without US cooperation, as US isolationism may actually benefit global policy development

UNESCO has developed guidelines for digital platform governance through inclusive multi-stakeholder processes involving 194 member states

Need to develop national digital infrastructure as countries have no other choice given current vulnerabilities

Summary

Strong agreement that individual countries lack sufficient power to address platform dominance, requiring collective bargaining and international cooperation to create effective responses

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Economic | Development

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers emphasize how tech companies have created vertically integrated monopolies that harm independent media through control of multiple layers of infrastructure and distribution

Speakers

– Chris Disspain
– Anya Schiffrin

Arguments

Big tech companies control multiple layers from cables to platforms, creating vertical integration that financially squeezes independent media

Platforms have polluted the information ecosystem, stolen intellectual property, become monopoly capitalists, and interfered with political processes

Topics

Economic | Infrastructure | Human rights

Both speakers highlight the serious human rights implications of platform power and the manipulative nature of corporate threats to exit markets

Speakers

– Pamella Sittoni
– Anya Schiffrin

Arguments

Platform actions can endanger lives, as seen in cases where user information leads to arrests and deaths

Companies threaten exit as a standard corporate playbook tactic, but this makes little economic sense as they profit from news content

Topics

Human rights | Economic

Both emphasize that effective governance requires good faith implementation and must operate at both local and global levels due to the borderless nature of digital platforms

Speakers

– Anine Kierulf
– Tawfik Jelassi

Arguments

Good faith constitutionalism is required for any regulatory framework to work effectively

Ethics standards need to be both local and global since platforms are borderless by nature

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Human rights

Unexpected consensus

Optimism about alternatives and human resilience

Speakers

– Chris Disspain
– Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
– Pamella Sittoni

Arguments

Internet infrastructure is physical, centralized and privately owned, creating choke points that can silence journalism or manipulate public discourse

Small states have power and can make different choices despite constraints, and shouldn’t accept pretend helplessness

AI is a useful tool that won’t replace journalism’s core function of storytelling, but raises concerns about content ownership and control

Explanation

Despite painting dire pictures of concentration and control, speakers unexpectedly showed optimism about human resilience, available alternatives, and the agency of smaller actors to make meaningful choices

Topics

Human rights | Development | Sociocultural

Importance of ethics and trust in media systems

Speakers

– Kjersti Loken Stavrum
– Tawfik Jelassi
– Anine Kierulf

Arguments

Nordic countries have brilliant press ethical systems that create fast lanes to trust and maintain high standards

Without facts there is no truth, without truth there is no trust, and without trust there is no shared reality for action

Citizens need both critical thinking skills and factual knowledge base, with focus on digital literacy and understanding manipulation

Explanation

Unexpected strong consensus emerged around the fundamental importance of ethical frameworks and trust-building mechanisms, with speakers from different backgrounds emphasizing similar principles

Topics

Human rights | Sociocultural | Legal and regulatory

Overall assessment

Summary

Speakers showed remarkable consensus on core issues: infrastructure concentration creates democratic vulnerabilities, regulation has been inadequate, collective action is necessary, and ethical frameworks remain crucial. Agreement spans technical, legal, and normative dimensions.

Consensus level

High level of consensus with significant implications – suggests broad expert agreement on problem diagnosis and general solution directions, indicating potential for coordinated policy responses despite political and economic challenges

Different viewpoints

Use of the term ‘regulation’ and approach to policy-making

Speakers

– Chris Disspain
– Tawfik Jelassi
– Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Arguments

Different people hear different things when you say regulation. If the Chinese government hears regulation, it means something completely different to when Tavik was talking about regulation, with him I agree, because he was talking about multi-stakeholder regulation, or what I would call policy, global policy that can be implemented around the world

UNESCO has developed guidelines for digital platform governance through inclusive multi-stakeholder processes involving 194 member states

There’s a political history of deliberate non-intervention and deregulation across the political spectrum that created current conditions

Summary

Chris Disspain warns against using the term ‘regulation’ because it can be misinterpreted by authoritarian governments, preferring ‘global policy’ through multi-stakeholder processes. Tawfik Jelassi advocates for UNESCO’s multi-stakeholder regulatory approach. Nielsen focuses on the political history of deregulation as the root problem.

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Human rights

Whether the problem is primarily corporate concentration or political choices

Speakers

– Chris Disspain
– Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Arguments

Internet infrastructure is physical, centralized and privately owned, creating choke points that can silence journalism or manipulate public discourse

There’s a political history of deliberate non-intervention and deregulation across the political spectrum that created current conditions

Summary

Disspain focuses on the structural problem of concentrated corporate ownership of infrastructure, while Nielsen emphasizes that this concentration resulted from deliberate political choices of deregulation by establishment parties across the political spectrum.

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Economic | Infrastructure

Optimism vs pessimism about current state and future prospects

Speakers

– Chris Disspain
– Anya Schiffrin

Arguments

But that said, it was ever thus. It might sound as if I’m suggesting we’re headed towards the end of a diverse media or the death of local news or a single point of control of our news. And I don’t believe that we are

We’re in a terrifying moment, one in which it feels like everything we’ve worked to build over decades is being dismantled

Summary

Disspain maintains historical perspective and optimism, arguing that press barons have always tried to manipulate media but haven’t succeeded completely, while Schiffrin presents a much more pessimistic view of current threats to democratic institutions and media freedom.

Topics

Human rights | Sociocultural

Unexpected differences

Terminology and framing of solutions

Speakers

– Chris Disspain
– Other panelists

Arguments

Different people hear different things when you say regulation. If the Chinese government hears regulation, it means something completely different

Various speakers using ‘regulation’ throughout their arguments

Explanation

Unexpectedly, there was significant disagreement about even using the word ‘regulation,’ with Disspain arguing it could be misappropriated by authoritarian governments, while other speakers freely used the term. This semantic disagreement reveals deeper concerns about how solutions might be co-opted.

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Human rights

Role of historical precedent in understanding current challenges

Speakers

– Chris Disspain
– Anya Schiffrin

Arguments

But that said, it was ever thus. Press barons have forever tried to manipulate what we read

We’re in a terrifying moment, one in which it feels like everything we’ve worked to build over decades is being dismantled

Explanation

Unexpectedly, there was a fundamental disagreement about whether current challenges represent continuity with historical patterns (Disspain’s view) or an unprecedented threat (Schiffrin’s view). This affects how urgently and drastically solutions need to be pursued.

Topics

Human rights | Sociocultural | Legal and regulatory

Overall assessment

Summary

The speakers showed remarkable consensus on identifying problems (platform concentration, dependency, lack of accountability) but significant disagreement on solutions, terminology, and urgency. Key areas of disagreement included whether to use ‘regulation’ vs ‘policy,’ whether problems are primarily structural or political, and whether current threats are historically unprecedented or part of ongoing patterns.

Disagreement level

Moderate disagreement with high consensus on problem identification but significant divergence on solutions and framing. This suggests that while there’s shared understanding of challenges, the path forward remains contested, which could complicate coordinated action and policy development.

Partial agreements

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers emphasize how tech companies have created vertically integrated monopolies that harm independent media through control of multiple layers of infrastructure and distribution

Speakers

– Chris Disspain
– Anya Schiffrin

Arguments

Big tech companies control multiple layers from cables to platforms, creating vertical integration that financially squeezes independent media

Platforms have polluted the information ecosystem, stolen intellectual property, become monopoly capitalists, and interfered with political processes

Topics

Economic | Infrastructure | Human rights

Both speakers highlight the serious human rights implications of platform power and the manipulative nature of corporate threats to exit markets

Speakers

– Pamella Sittoni
– Anya Schiffrin

Arguments

Platform actions can endanger lives, as seen in cases where user information leads to arrests and deaths

Companies threaten exit as a standard corporate playbook tactic, but this makes little economic sense as they profit from news content

Topics

Human rights | Economic

Both emphasize that effective governance requires good faith implementation and must operate at both local and global levels due to the borderless nature of digital platforms

Speakers

– Anine Kierulf
– Tawfik Jelassi

Arguments

Good faith constitutionalism is required for any regulatory framework to work effectively

Ethics standards need to be both local and global since platforms are borderless by nature

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Human rights

Key takeaways

Internet infrastructure is physical and privately owned, creating concentrated power that can control information flow and threaten media independence

Current concentration of digital infrastructure resembles historical press baron control but is more pronounced due to global reach and vertical integration

Platforms have become bad actors by polluting information ecosystems, stealing intellectual property, and using monopoly power to squeeze independent media

Traditional regulation approaches are too slow for fast-moving technology, requiring new multi-stakeholder global policy frameworks

The US government actively opposes tech regulation and taxation globally, forcing other countries to develop solutions without US cooperation

Developing countries face particular vulnerabilities where platform exit threats have asymmetric impacts – minimal effect on company profits but major disruption to information access

Trust in media requires ethical standards, transparency, and accountability, with Nordic press ethical systems serving as successful models

AI development by the same tech companies increases content control concerns, with tools like Google AI overview reducing traffic and revenue to original news sources

Small states and regions have more power than they realize and must make deliberate choices about digital sovereignty and infrastructure development

Citizens need both critical thinking skills and factual knowledge bases to navigate manipulated information environments

Resolutions and action items

Countries and publishers should negotiate collectively rather than individually to increase bargaining power against platforms

Develop national and regional digital infrastructure as an alternative to dependency on US-based tech companies

Implement transparency and accountability requirements for all digital infrastructure decisions

Regulate digital infrastructure with human rights and freedom of expression as foundational principles

Immediately begin building public alternatives including decentralized, federated, and open-source solutions

Establish regional press ethical systems similar to Nordic models to build trust and maintain standards

Require platforms to post bonds or deposits before operating in countries to ensure fines can be collected

Pursue digital levies and AI taxes with funding earmarked for journalism support

Invest in digital literacy education that combines critical thinking with factual knowledge

Unresolved issues

How to balance national sovereignty with the global nature of internet infrastructure and platforms

Whether European or other regional alternatives to US tech companies would behave fundamentally differently

How to implement multi-stakeholder global policy when major powers like the US refuse to participate

What specific mechanisms can ensure platform accountability and transparency in practice

How to fund and govern public service digital alternatives at scale

Whether current legal frameworks can effectively address extraterritorial regulation challenges

How to protect journalists and sources when platforms share data with authoritarian governments

What constitutes fair compensation for AI companies’ use of media content and intellectual property

How small states can practically achieve digital sovereignty given resource constraints

Whether voluntary ethical standards can be effective without enforcement mechanisms

Suggested compromises

Co-regulatory systems that combine government oversight with multi-stakeholder participation rather than pure self-regulation or state control

Fixed scale fees for AI use of intellectual property similar to compulsory licensing in pharmaceuticals, as an alternative to complex negotiation frameworks

Regional cooperation and collective bargaining to balance platform power while respecting national differences

Gradual development of alternative infrastructure while maintaining interoperability with existing systems

Polluter-pays principles applied to information pollution, requiring platforms to fund cleanup efforts by credible media

Global ethical standards implemented through local regulatory bodies that can contextualize principles for specific regions

Public-private partnerships for digital infrastructure development that maintain public interest oversight

Phased implementation of platform regulations with clear timelines and escalating consequences for non-compliance

I think it is the same old story even only much more pronounced… There’s also a political story that I think Chris gestured towards… a long period in which corporate consolidation, liberalization opening up media markets have not only been accepted but endorsed and wholeheartedly pursued by establishment political parties of both the center-left and the center-right.

Speaker

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Reason

This comment reframes the entire discussion by highlighting that the current crisis isn’t just about corporate greed or technological inevitability, but about deliberate political choices made across the political spectrum. By citing Obama’s 2015 quote defending US tech companies, Nielsen demonstrates that this concentration of power was actively facilitated by politicians who are now being asked to solve the problem.

Impact

This shifted the conversation from viewing tech concentration as an external force to examining the political responsibility and complicity in creating these dependencies. It challenged the panel to think beyond regulation as a solution and consider the deeper political economy that enabled this situation.

So what Google does in Australia, it should also be compelled to do the same in Africa. And also we have had situations where these companies are allowed to pick and choose. They pick and choose who to work with, which media house to work with, who to pay and how much to pay.

Speaker

Pamella Sittoni

Reason

This comment exposed the global inequality in how tech platforms operate, revealing how they exploit power asymmetries between different regions. It highlighted that the problem isn’t just about regulation, but about ensuring consistent global standards rather than allowing companies to cherry-pick favorable jurisdictions.

Impact

This comment introduced the crucial dimension of global inequality and power asymmetries into the discussion, moving beyond the European/US-centric perspective to highlight how smaller economies are particularly vulnerable to platform manipulation and exit threats.

We assumed that the US was an ally for our liberal democracy and now we know for sure that it’s not… we more and more see parallel to what we saw in the 1990s when the climate policy also understood that the polluter had to pay.

Speaker

Kjersti Loken Stavrum

Reason

This comment marked a fundamental shift in how European policymakers view the transatlantic relationship on digital issues. The ‘polluter pays’ analogy provided a powerful new framework for thinking about platform responsibility, drawing from successful environmental policy precedents.

Impact

This comment crystallized the geopolitical dimension of the discussion and provided a concrete policy framework (‘polluter pays’) that other panelists could build upon. It helped shift the conversation from abstract concerns about concentration to specific policy mechanisms.

I think we need to be a little bit careful about what we say… Different people hear different things when you say regulation… What we need is global policy. And what we need is the good guys… need to actually buy into the global multi-stakeholder way of making policy.

Speaker

Chris Disspain

Reason

This comment introduced crucial nuance about the dangers of regulatory language, pointing out how authoritarian governments could exploit calls for ‘regulation’ to justify censorship. It distinguished between harmful state control and beneficial multi-stakeholder governance.

Impact

This comment forced the panel to be more precise in their language and consider how their recommendations could be misused by bad actors. It elevated the discussion from simple calls for regulation to more sophisticated thinking about governance mechanisms.

The platforms have shown themselves to be bad actors in many cases… Their playbook was and is the U.S. classic corporate playbook for lobbying, PR efforts, spreading misinformation about laws, commissioning research and threatening exit.

Speaker

Anya Schiffrin

Reason

This comment provided a systematic analysis of platform behavior as following established corporate resistance patterns, rather than being unique to tech companies. It reframed platform resistance as predictable corporate behavior that can be countered with appropriate policy responses.

Impact

This comment helped the panel move beyond viewing platform resistance as insurmountable to seeing it as a familiar challenge with known solutions. It provided strategic insight for policymakers dealing with platform threats and lobbying.

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must… I don’t think we should accept the sort of pretend helplessness of powerful politicians who that way escape scrutiny and responsibility for the actions that they take.

Speaker

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Reason

This comment challenged the narrative of inevitability and helplessness that often surrounds discussions of tech power. By invoking Thucydides while rejecting fatalism, Nielsen demanded accountability from political leaders who claim they have no choices.

Impact

This comment served as a powerful call to action, rejecting defeatism and demanding that politicians take responsibility for their choices. It helped conclude the discussion on an empowering note, emphasizing agency rather than victimhood.

Overall assessment

These key comments fundamentally shaped the discussion by introducing multiple layers of complexity and challenging simplistic narratives. Nielsen’s opening intervention reframed the entire conversation from a tech-centric problem to a political economy issue, while Sittoni’s contributions ensured global inequality remained central to the analysis. The interplay between calls for regulation (Schiffrin, Stavrum) and warnings about regulatory language (Disspain) created productive tension that led to more nuanced policy thinking. The discussion evolved from identifying problems to examining root causes, from lamenting tech power to demanding political accountability, and from viewing the situation as inevitable to recognizing it as the result of specific choices that can be changed. The comments collectively moved the conversation beyond technical solutions toward a more sophisticated understanding of power, politics, and the need for coordinated global action while maintaining democratic values.

How to implement global multi-stakeholder policy without it being interpreted as authoritarian regulation by different governments

Speaker

Chris Disspain

Explanation

Chris warned about the danger of using the term ‘regulation’ as it means different things to different governments, with authoritarian regimes interpreting it differently than democratic multi-stakeholder approaches

How to create fair negotiations between monopolistic platforms and publishers when there’s such power asymmetry

Speaker

Anja Schiffrin

Explanation

The competitive environment directly affects negotiations, and fair negotiations are impossible when monopolies are at the table, requiring new frameworks

How to develop regulatory frameworks that can keep pace with rapidly evolving technology

Speaker

Anine Kierulf

Explanation

Law is always trailing behind technological development, but the current pace of change makes this gap more problematic for democratic processes

How smaller countries and regions can collectively bargain with big tech platforms

Speaker

Pamela Sittoni

Explanation

Individual countries like Kenya lack bargaining power, but collective negotiation (like all of Africa together) could provide more leverage

Whether European and global actors can maintain tech regulation and taxation without US cooperation

Speaker

Anja Schiffrin

Explanation

With the US opposing tech regulation globally, the question is whether other regions can proceed independently or if US isolationism actually helps other countries develop their own policies

How to balance critical thinking education with factual knowledge in the age of information overload

Speaker

Anine Kierulf

Explanation

Students have better critical thinking skills but less factual knowledge, and both are needed as a foundation for navigating the current information environment

How to create sustainable funding models for public service alternatives to commercial platforms

Speaker

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Explanation

While technical alternatives exist, the question of how to fund, govern, and enforce rules for public alternatives remains unresolved

How to enforce accountability measures like billion-dollar bonds for platforms operating in developing countries

Speaker

Anja Schiffrin

Explanation

Platforms avoid fines by claiming no physical presence in countries, so new mechanisms like requiring deposits before operations could ensure accountability

How to develop national digital infrastructure as an alternative to dependency on US tech companies

Speaker

Kjersti Loken Stavrum

Explanation

Building national alternatives like cloud storage and media tech infrastructure could reduce vulnerability to changes in foreign policy

How to ensure AI development serves journalism rather than replacing it while addressing content scraping issues

Speaker

Pamela Sittoni

Explanation

AI tools like Google’s AI overview are reducing traffic to news sites by scraping content without compensation, threatening the sustainability of journalism