“Hey Journalists, Nobody Is Coming to Save Us.” So reads the headline of a recent opinion piece in Nieman Reports, a venerable publication affiliated with Harvard University that describes itself as “covering thought leadership in journalism.”
Just within the past year, the article reports, major layoffs and buyouts have occurred in every type of media organization under every form of ownership and business model. Examples range from the billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post to nonprofits like The Texas Tribune; from public media outlets like New York Public Radio to scrappy, entrepreneurial, multimedia web publications like Buzzfeed News and Vox Media. Despite the many innovative attempts over the past quarter century to “save journalism,” seemingly the only news in the news business is that it continues to shrink away at an accelerating pace. On our current course, by the end of 2024 the country will have lost a third of its newspapers since 2005. In more than half of all U.S. counties, people either have no access to local news from any source or have to rely on a single surviving outlet, usually a weekly newspaper.
So, what’s to be done? The Nieman Reports opinion piece advises journalists to adopt a four-part personal plan that includes developing more marketable skills, stepped-up networking, and staying abreast of industry trends like increasing reliance on charitable contributions and the use of artificial intelligence.
But while that’s no doubt practical advice for anyone trying to build or hold on to a career in journalism, it’s also obtuse to the real nature of the problem and needlessly fatalistic. The decline of journalism—and the concomitant rise of a poisoned, “post-truth” information environment that deeply threatens democracy—is not a development that journalists, or society at large, must accept as inevitable. Contrary to received ideas, it’s not an unavoidable consequence of digital technology, generational change, or immutable market forces.
Until about 40 years ago, the courts held that the First Amendment established not just a right to free speech, but also a right to hear the speech of others that must be protected from monopolists.
Instead, it is a direct result of specific, boneheaded policy choices that politicians in both parties made over the past 40 years. By repealing or failing to enforce basic market rules that had long contained concentrated corporate power, policy makers enabled the emergence of a new kind of monopoly that engages in a broad range of deeply anticompetitive business practices. These include, most significantly, the cornering of advertising markets, which historically provided the primary means of financing journalism. This is the colossal policy failure that has effectively destroyed the economic foundations of a free press.
Fortunately, Joe Biden’s administration, along with other governments around the world, is already taking important steps to repair the damage. But perversely, the press itself barely covers the story while many reporters and editors, including some of the industry’s “thought leaders,” remain focused on individual actions or on small-bore reforms that are not remotely adequate to the problem. It’s time to wake up and join the big fight.
A key first step to understanding what’s gone wrong with the business of journalism is to focus on the largely forgotten history of the First Amendment. Most Americans learn in school that it prevents the government from abridging freedom of speech and of the press. Less well known is that until about 40 years ago, both the courts and public opinion viewed the amendment, and the spirit of the Constitution generally, as also requiring that government take positive steps to protect these freedoms from interference by monopolists.
This tradition in America’s political economy found early expression in the Postal Act of 1792. Reflecting the founding generation’s belief that a democratic republic required an informed citizenry, the law stated that the largest and most crucial communications network of the era had to treat all users equally by offering the same prices and terms of service to everyone. It was the same principle that in much later debates over the governance of the internet would be known as “net neutrality.”
Congress also importantly set rates for the mailing of printed material low enough to make the production and distribution of newspapers, pamphlets, and books economically viable. The result was a spectacular flourishing of media in early-19th-century America. As the sociologist Paul Starr has noted, “When the United States was neither a world power nor a primary center of scientific discovery, it was already a leader in communications,” thanks to public investment in a universally accessible postal system and the innovations of its flourishing free press.
Americans once again deployed extensive government interventions after monopolists gained control of a new communications network that had become essential to journalism by the mid-19th century. The dominant telegraph company of the day, Western Union, which fell under the control of the financier Jay Gould, and the dominant newswire provider, the Associated Press, became so intertwined that they were called “a double-headed monopoly.” Both colluded to force independent newspapers into signing exclusive contracts, so if a paper chose not to use Western Union for telegraph services, it was denied access to the Associated Press for newswire services, and vice versa.
To reverse such concentrations of control over the information environment, Americans took myriad measures. As with the U.S. Postal Service, they enacted regulations that required, for example, that telegraph and telephone companies operate as utilities providing every user, or class of users, with the same prices and terms of service. Similarly, while granted an exemption from liability for the messages people sent over their wires, telecommunications companies were not allowed to pick and choose who got to send or receive what content. Americans also used antitrust enforcement and utility regulations to prohibit such companies from vertically integrating into adjacent lines of businesses, such as advertising and publishing. Finally, by the end of the 19th century, privacy laws in every state prohibited them from disclosing or otherwise misusing the personal data generated by their users.
These measures in combination prevented telecommunications companies from adopting the surveillance advertising business model used today by Google, Facebook, and other digital platforms. While phone companies were allowed to offset their costs by selling advertising in the “yellow pages,” they were not allowed to wiretap their own customers and use what they learned to target third-party ads, as Google and Facebook do today. Such an abuse of privacy and monopoly power to manipulate and exploit customers was simply unthinkable.
With the introduction of radio and later television, Americans again used regulation, along with aggressive antitrust and other competition policies, to ensure that these technologies did not lead to an information environment dominated by corporate monopolies. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Communications Commission and gave it expansive authority to enforce anti-monopoly principles in broadcast markets. In the early 1940s, the FCC used these powers to force NBC to divest itself of one of its two dominant radio networks, now known as ABC, thereby preventing NBC from monopolizing the radio industry. The government also applied the same principle by forcing the Big Eight Hollywood studios of the era to divest itself of movie theater chains.
The FCC similarly put a check on monopoly by preventing the cross-ownership of radio, television, and newspaper companies. In 1970, the FCC went further by enacting its “Fin-Syn” and Prime Time Access rules. These were aimed at preventing the three dominant networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) from monopolizing the production of television programming, including by limiting the number of hours they could broadcast their own content in prime time. The rule change led to what many have described as a golden age of television, as independent television production companies gained the ability to bring groundbreaking programming like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Norman Lear’s All in the Family to market.
Consistent with the view that the public had a First Amendment right to a free flow of ideas, the FCC also took special measures to ensure that broadcast license holders, whose numbers were necessarily limited in any one location, did not suppress or monopolize the news and public affairs programming going out over public airwaves. Thus, in 1949, the FCC instituted the Fairness Doctrine, which promoted viewpoint diversity by requiring that television broadcasters “affirmatively endeavor to make … facilities available for the expression of contrasting viewpoints held by responsible elements with respect to the controversial issues presented.” The Fairness Doctrine created an environment in the image of the Founders’ positivist view of the First Amendment by placing the need for a well-informed citizenry over the desire of broadcasters to use programming solely to benefit their own private interests.
With little controversy, the Supreme Court applied a variation of this principle to print journalism as well. In a 1945 antitrust case challenging the monopoly power of the Associated Press wire service over individual newspapers, Justice Hugo Black gave a succinct summation of how the Court viewed the relationship between monopoly and free speech. “Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution,” Black wrote, “but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not.”
The FCC later extended the same principle to cable TV, ruling in 1972, for example, that cable companies must maintain facilities for production of local programming and make these facilities available to the public on a nondiscriminatory basis. As late as 1994, the Court reaffirmed principles of neutrality and viewpoint diversity when it upheld a law requiring cable companies to carry content from broadcast stations. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy stated that people, not corporations, should decide what they watch, noting, “At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for him or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence. Our political system and cultural life rest upon this ideal.”
Even well into the digital era, public policy continued to guard strongly against the monopolization of media and communications markets. Examples include the 2000 antitrust decision that prevented Microsoft from leveraging its dominant Windows operating system into monopolization of the internet browser market—a ruling that opened opportunities for new companies, including Google and Facebook, to develop application-based services for the emerging World Wide Web.
The extensive use of government to manage competition in media and communications markets was foundational to the growth of a sustainable free press in America. But so was another, closely related, and too often underappreciated factor: the flourishing of open, competitive advertising markets, structured by government policy, that served as the primary means of financing journalism.
Advertising-supported journalism has obvious downsides. Particularly at smaller media outlets lacking a broad advertising base, individual marketers can gain undue influence over reporters and editors. But broad reliance on advertising to finance journalism proved to have two overwhelming advantages. First, it enabled a critical core of publishers and broadcasters to avoid becoming financially dependent on public funds controlled by the politicians and other policy makers they covered. Second, it enabled them to produce high-quality, civic-minded journalism at a price that ordinary people were willing and able to pay. Much as is often said about democracy itself, advertising-supported journalism might be the worst way to finance a free press except for all the rest.
The importance of advertising to the development of journalism in America is hard to overstate. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin supported the news stories in his Pennsylvania Gazette by devoting 45 percent of its pages to advertising. In the late 19th century, newspapers like The New York Times and Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch relied on ad-driven business models to set their prices low enough to reach mass audiences while also having the revenue to expand their coverage of city halls, statehouses, and foreign capitals. Advertising dollars also supported a rich diversity of crusading smaller journals, including the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and Frederick Douglass’s crusading Black civil rights newspaper, The North Star.
In the Progressive Era, advertising underwrote the “muckraking” journalism that helped to uncover the abuses of corporate monopolies like Standard Oil and corrupt political machines like Tammany Hall. To finance the work of pioneering investigative journalists like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, the publisher of McClure’s Magazine sold ad space to corporations hawking, among other products, the Royal Tourist, a luxury automobile described as “The Pink of Perfection.” Corporate advertising financed exposés of corporate abuses.
Relying on advertising to cover the cost of reporting has obvious downsides. But much as is often said about democracy itself, advertising-supported journalism might be the worst way to finance a free press except for all the rest.
Similarly, in the 20th century, advertising remained the lifeblood of serious journalism, funding media outlets ranging from Time magazine and 60 Minutes to myriad smaller publications focused on advocacy for social justice causes, including titles like Jet, Mother Jones, Mother Earth News, Ms., and The Advocate. Meanwhile, business-to-business advertising supported flourishing trade publications with titles like Aviation Week, Multi-Housing News, and Defense Contract Litigation Reporter that played an important role in the information ecosystem of the era by reporting on often obscure but critical corners of the country’s political economy.
Supporting a broad advertising base for publications of all kinds during this era was rigorous, economy-wide enforcement of anti-monopoly laws. Into the 1980s, antitrust enforcement continually constrained mergers among local banks and other financial institutions, as well as among local supermarkets and other retailers, thereby preventing the number of advertisers supporting local newspapers and broadcasters from shrinking. The 1936 Robinson-Patman Act, which checked abusive business practices by chain stores and thereby limited their spread, is another important example of how U.S. competition policies—for as long as they were still enforced—helped to ensure a diverse, locally owned retail sector and, by extension, diverse, locally owned journalism.
Even into the early internet age, advertising continued to play an important role in sustaining journalism, including local and niche publications. During the aughts, small legacy publications like this one, as well as many local newspapers, were able to rejuvenate their finances through banner ads published on their websites. These, importantly, included ads targeted to individual readers. Marketers placed such ads on small publications’ sites through a Google-controlled digital ad exchange based on Google’s knowledge of the reader’s web history and personal interests.
Such targeted digital advertising also financed new independent voices, including Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo and Ana Marie Cox, founder of the political blog Wonkette. It also enabled a wave of new digital publications including Gawker in 2002, Pajamas Media in 2004, and the Huffington Post in 2005.
While other digital products like video games and social media feeds increasingly competed for consumers’ time and attention, the demand for journalism of all kinds remained strong, and with the help of digital advertising the business model for it in many ways became stronger during the early days of the internet. Yet these benefits were eventually overwhelmed by the long-building negative effects of dramatic changes in public policy that were little noticed at the time but would become the root cause of today’s crisis of journalism.
The first of these was a sea change in antitrust enforcement that began during the Reagan administration. New prosecutorial guidelines adopted in 1982 and 1984 gave the green light to virtually all mergers and acquisitions except in cases that involved provable collusion or conclusive evidence that a merger would lead to higher consumer prices. This change in policy, combined with ongoing financial-sector deregulation, led to a rapid wave of mergers and acquisitions and to a dramatic increase in corporate concentration, including among media properties.
At roughly the same time, self-styled market conservatives also began to target the specific regulatory regimes that Americans had long used to structure media and communications markets specifically. Under Ronald Reagan, the FCC, for example, began dismantling many of its long-standing prohibitions on cross-ownership of radio, television, and newspaper properties, while also lifting limits on the number of broadcast stations a single person or corporation could own.
Then, in 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine. Within a year, an obscure radio personality named Rush Limbaugh began broadcasting the unbalanced, hyper-partisan programming that launched nationally syndicated conservative talk radio. In combination with relaxed antitrust enforcement, these and similar measures led not only to the decline of diverse, locally owned media outlets committed to balanced local journalism, but also to their replacement by giant national chains dedicated to “talking head” opinion journalism, such as NewsCorp’s Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast Group.
The movement to overturn the traditional public systems for governing media and communications markets continued under President Bill Clinton, most notably with passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. This legislation repealed, for example, the FCC’s ban on cross-ownership of telephone and cable television companies. As these and other changes to the policy map erased the legal boundary lines that had historically kept the different layers of the information supply chain structurally separated, media moguls were able to forge vast, vertically integrated monopolies with names like News Corporation (now NewsCorp), Viacom, and Comcast, that combined ownership of broadcast, cable, and internet service provider infrastructure with ownership of television and radio stations, movie studios, and other entertainment enterprises.
That same year, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act. Its stated purpose was to crack down on internet porn and encourage the responsible growth of the era’s internet chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards. But the bill contained a 26-word passage known as Section 230 that, in combination with other policy failures, would create huge, unintended consequences.
The CDA created a unique combination of powers and privileges for entities it loosely defined as providers of “interactive computer services.” As with telegraph and telephone companies, these entities were granted an exemption from libel law, which meant that they could not be sued or prosecuted when third-party users transmitted false or illegal information across their networks. But unlike with telegraph and telephone companies, providers of these new “interactive computer services” gained the power to discriminate among their users, including by censoring the speech of some and elevating the speech of others.
Soon, and fatefully, the courts ruled that Section 230 applied not just to chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards but also to fast-growing social media platforms like Google and Facebook. This enormously amplified the already fast-growing monopolistic powers enjoyed by the owners of these platforms.
Thus a handful of men like Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, gained control over what was becoming an essential communications infrastructure upon which millions of individuals and companies depended for their livelihoods. This included newspapers and other media outlets, which increasingly needed these platforms to reach their readers, viewers, and, as we’ll see, even their advertisers.
Yet unlike with the owners of those essential networks, the owners of these platforms faced no constraints in their ability to control what messages their users got to send or receive. Nor were they prohibited, like traditional regulated utilities, from leveraging their monopoly power into other lines of business, most notably including news distribution and advertising. Nor were they prevented from surveilling their users’ personal data and monetizing it in any way they wished, including by allowing marketers and even foreign governments to use their networks to manipulate individual users and classes of users.
Because of these policy failures, today’s dominant digital platform monopolies threaten a free press in many ways. The most crucial and straightforward of these is through a massive theft of the advertising dollars needed to finance independent journalism.
People still consume huge amounts of journalism every day even if they are now more likely to view it through their smartphone or tablet. And advertisers are willing to pay huge sums of money to reach these consumers, in no small measure because they tend to have higher-than-average discretionary income. But much of that ad money no longer flows back to the people who produce the journalism, even when the ads appear on their own digital publications. Rather, it flows largely into the vaults of Google, Facebook, and other platforms, increasingly including Amazon, which have inserted themselves as self-dealing middlemen in digital advertising markets.
Starting nearly 20 years ago, through a series of acquisitions that would have been blocked by regulators but for the lax antitrust enforcement standards that prevailed at the time, Google managed to gain control of key digital advertising marketplaces on which publications and marketers find each other. A study by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority found that by 2020, Google controlled a dominant position—as high as 90 percent—in every layer of the so-called ad tech auction market, in which British publishers sell digital ad space and marketers buy it. According to an antitrust suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and eight state attorneys general that is likely to come to trial this spring, Google built and maintains this monopoly in the United States as well through a broad range of anticompetitive, illegal practices. These include acquiring competitors for the purpose of suppressing competition, as well as distorting and manipulating the auction process for its own benefit.
What’s the harm? Start with advertisers. Google’s private ad tech markets operate in near-total, unregulated darkness. As a result, advertisers cannot know for sure where, how often, or sometimes even if their ads are seen. Recently, the research firm Adalytics charged that Google had cheated advertisers out of potentially billions of dollars by placing their ads in obscure, dubious corners of the internet when they thought they were buying space in popular, high-quality websites and apps.
Then there are the harms to journalism. Google uses its monopoly control of ad tech markets to skim off an enormous fraction of the money advertisers spend when they place ads on independent websites and other digital media. By its own admission, Google siphons off an average of more than 30 cents in fees out of every dollar flowing between advertisers and publishers through its ad tech exchanges. In 2022, Google raked in at least $32 billion from ads placed on third-party websites. This is money that could and should be going to help support publishers and journalists; it is their skill and effort, after all, that attract the readers and viewers advertisers want to reach. Instead, all the money just goes straight into Google’s coffers, thanks to its control of ad tech markets.
Getting to the root cause of journalism’s crisis is not complicated. Simply put, it requires returning to the same basic anti-monopoly principles that Americans used during previous revolutions in communications technology to preserve our First Amendment rights.
There’s more. Before Google, if a marketer wanted to reach a person who read The New Yorker, for example, it had to take out an ad in that magazine. But now this is no longer necessary. Thanks to the failure to apply the same privacy laws and other regulations to digital platform monopolies that long applied to owners of other essential communications infrastructure, Google can use its users’ personal data in ways that allow a marketer to serve ads to a New Yorker subscriber on cheaper sites that Google knows the subscriber also visits. This includes sites that Google itself owns, such as YouTube, for example, or the Google Search and Google Maps apps. In this way, the marketer avoids having to help pay for the expensive quality journalism that attracts The New Yorker’s audience, while the platforms capture the lion’s share of every one of these ad dollars.
Compounding the loss to journalists is the theft of their intellectual property. The owners of platform monopolies attract eyeballs to their own properties in no small measure by offering users a way to access journalism and other editorial content produced by others, such as an article produced by a local newspaper that appears in a Facebook newsfeed or that is summarized in a Google search result. But rather than pay the fair market value of this content, the platforms consistently abuse their market power to coerce news organizations into accepting far less.
A recent study by the Brattle Group and academic researchers estimates the magnitude of the theft. The researchers started by looking at the amount of revenue Google takes in when it sells ads on its own properties that appear next to news content. They then compared this number to the amount that Google pays news organizations for this content. The study concludes that Google coerces news organizations into accepting some $10 billion to $12 billion less each year for the use of their content than the fair market price Google would have to pay if it didn’t have monopoly power over journalists and publishers. Meanwhile, Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and many other properties, annually uses its monopoly power to purloin content worth some $1.9 billion, according to the study.
But even this accounting doesn’t get the full measure of the theft. Together, Meta and Google properties soak up an estimated 50 percent of the $200 billion–plus U.S. digital ad market. Yet according to suits brought by the Justice Department, the FTC, and other regulators, much of the market dominance derives from illegal, anticompetitive business practices. Indeed, had regulators and the courts enforced the kind of structural separations and privacy laws that, as we’ve seen, the United States historically applied to the owners of essential communications infrastructure, these platforms would not even be allowed to be in the advertising business, let alone be allowed to monopolize the business of selling targeted ads based on surveillance of people’s personal data.
But because of that monopoly power, today’s media organizations have no choice but to go along with whatever terms the big platforms dictate. Nor, given their increasingly abject dependence on the platforms for reader and viewer traffic as well as website hosting, can media organizations complain about such abuses without potentially paying a fatal price. In 2018, Wired ran a cover story critical of Facebook, noting, “Every publisher knows that, at best, they are sharecroppers on Facebook’s massive industrial farm.” The number of readers following links from Facebook to Wired suddenly dropped 90 percent.
These days, even a platform like the Apple News app, which allows consumers to access a broad range of publications for a low monthly price, can create deep dependencies among newspaper and magazine publishers and the journalists who work for them. Participating in Apple’s News Partner Program can bring publications new readers and advertisers. But Apple pays nothing for the journalism on its app while taking a 30 percent cut of the revenue generated by its selling ad space next to this content. Meanwhile, participating publishers must pay Apple News an additional 15 percent commission when consumers subscribe through the app rather than directly, which more and more do. If publishers don’t agree to participate in the News Partner Program, then Apple takes 30 percent of any subscription revenue they raise when people purchase subscriptions through the Apple App Store.
Then there is the question of what will happen when a publication dependent on Apple News publishes something that negatively affects Apple’s far-flung corporate interests. A hint came last October after the talk-show host and social critic Jon Stewart told Apple executives that he planned to air programming critical of China’s government on his Apple TV show during the next season. Apple, which takes in a fifth of its sales from China while also relying on China almost exclusively for manufacturing its smartphones and computers, canceled his show.
What’s the solution? Recently, much of the media world has been abuzz about a long-awaited philanthropic initiative called Press Forward. The project is a coalition of 22 major charitable organizations concerned about the future of democracy that came together and collectively pledged this past September to donate $100 million a year for five years to local newsrooms. But while the size of the pledge is unprecedented and desperately needed, it’s nowhere near enough. The Pro Publica founding general partner Richard J. Tofel estimates that $100 million is perhaps 10 percent of the total money needed just to keep small local publications healthy in light of their on-going losses in revenue.
Another coalition, Rebuild Local News, advocates for an innovative set of policies that would support local journalism with tax subsidies. It is specifically asking Congress to provide a $250 refundable tax credit for Americans who buy subscriptions to local news outlets and a $2,500 to $5,000 tax credit for businesses that advertise in local media. The coalition also calls for a government-subsidized “super-sized Newsmatch” fund that would provide at least a three-to-one match for charitable contributions to local news organizations.
Even if this plan came to pass, however, its advocates estimate that it would raise no more than $3 billion to $5 billion for local journalism. That would be a godsend to many local publications that have lost financial viability, including the many in danger of being devoured by vulture capital funds intent on stripping out their last remaining assets. But it is nowhere near what’s needed to restore a healthy, sustainable, diverse, and independent press when each year Google, Facebook, and other platforms are using anticompetitive and often illegal business practices to rob ad revenue and editorial content worth many tens of billions.
Getting to the root cause of journalism’s crisis is not complicated, even if it requires us all to raise our sights and see the broader pattern. Simply put, it requires returning to the same basic anti-monopoly principles that Americans used during previous revolutions in communications technology to preserve our First Amendment rights to speak, and to hear the speech of others.
One of those principles is strict, structural separations between the different levels of the information supply chain. Thus, enforcers should use traditional antitrust laws to keep all owners of essential infrastructure, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other digital platforms, out of adjacent lines of business. This should include control of businesses that are horizontally adjacent, such as when Facebook purchased the rival social media platform Instagram. And it should include control of businesses that are vertically adjacent, such as Google’s takeover of the ad tech firm DoubleClick or its big acquisitions of companies engaged in cloud computing and artificial intelligence, which radically amplify its monopoly power.
Fortunately, enforcers in the United States and around much of the world are already taking important first steps along these lines. As previously mentioned, the Justice Department is suing Google to break up its control of digital ad tech exchanges. It is also pursuing another suit, likely to be decided soon, that charges Google with unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search advertising market. Though not always successful, under Biden, antitrust enforcers are winning many tough cases, not least because they are asking for a return to the original intent of antitrust law—a position that resonates with many conservative jurists committed to “strict construction.” (See “Winning the Anti-Monopoly Game,” in the November/December 2023 issue of this magazine.) Similar antitrust suits against the platform monopolies have also been filed by the European Commission, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, and regulators in Germany, Korea, India, and elsewhere.
Law enforcers should also make clear that the unprecedented combination of powers and privileges created by Section 230 applies only to small chat rooms and bulletin boards, not to providers of essential communications infrastructure. The simplest and most straightforward way to move toward these goals would be for the FTC, the FCC, or both to assert their full authority to regulate the terms of service and pricing behaviors of platform monopolists. This is essentially what the FCC did in 2015 with the Open Internet Order, which enforced net neutrality on internet service providers, but in that case it applied the principle to physical, as opposed to virtual, infrastructure. Furthermore, the FTC could stop many of the abuses in digital advertising markets, including those regarding users’ personal privacy, just by evoking its broad authority, under Section 5 of its enabling legislation, to restrict unfair methods of competition.
None of these policies taken by themselves is sufficient to fix our broken information environment. But in combination, they can significantly address the central threats to freedom of speech and of the press. To ensure that policy makers have the political cover they need to take on today’s unprecedented concentrations of corporate power over what we can say and hear, journalists have to understand, and help the public to understand, what the real stakes are.
The post How Fighting Monopoly Can Save Journalism appeared first on Washington Monthly.
