The High-Level Panel on Public Interest Media, urgently calls for decisive public action now to secure a future for public interest media and develop the policies needed to shape tomorrow’s information markets for economic prosperity and social welfare.
Too much of the value of the media is appropriated by digital platforms and AI firms, whose profits rest on the information produced by other content providers.
Governments need to do more to safeguard free and independent media and to shape the market in ways that encourage the right kinds of investments and innovation by private actors. Guardrails must be embedded in any support mechanism to protect against government interference or capture.
Two actions are proposed to protect public interest media in the information age. One, invest in free and independent journalism by diversifying and increasing resources for the production of reliable information. Two, shape informational ecosystems in the public interest through active use of industrial policies and safeguards against media capture and interference
Action 1
More must be done to support public interest media when the business model they have relied upon has collapsed and to counter the investments made by authoritarian powers in mis- and disinformation. To deliver on this first action, a three-part policy response is proposed.
First, public support and investment in public interest media must be increased nationally and internationally. New funding models are needed to arrest the catastrophic decline in local and national independent media, along with new ways of paying for public service media provision.
Options include direct subsidies and grants (distributed though independently governed entities or according to clear transparent rules to mitigate risks of political interference) or indirect subsidies such as tax credits or value-added tax exemptions, which have already proven their effectiveness and can be scaled up and replicated.
Other models to foster the financial sustainability of journalism include the use of citizen vouchers (providing everyone with an annual amount to spend on subscriptions), setting up and supporting national journalism funds, or exploring new license fee options. Public funding for journalism should never mean government influence over journalism, and careful design of the institutional arrangements underpinning this support is required to guarantee editorial independence.
Second, new media compensation models are needed for allocating fairly and efficiently the rewards accruing from the economic value produced by public interest media and for providing the incentives and resources necessary for the sustenance of quality public interest media.
It is time for governments to act decisively on preventing digital (for example, social media) and AI platforms from free riding on the work of primary content providers. In concert with direct levies (as outlined above), this can be achieved through tighter and expanded copyright laws — for example, not allowing these highly profitable enterprises to take advantage of “fair use” exemptions, originally designed for academics.
Examples of where this has been tried include Australia’s bargaining code, Canada’s Online News Act, and Indonesia’s regulation on publisher rights.
Fair compensation can also be achieved through the development of new business models and public interest frameworks . For example, the Global Media Trust is developing scalable regulatory, economic, and technical frameworks to enable collective licensing of thousands of public interest information sources by AI companies with a focus on “low-resource” languages that, while collectively spoken by billions, are not the priority of global tech companies and would not individually be in a position to reach deals with AI actors.
Third, implement digital taxes on the major platforms to provide additional revenue to support journalism as well as to address the negative externalities caused by the new digital platforms.
Because they profit from the work of others, it is appropriate to tax the major platforms’ revenue directly through new levies and digital taxes before asking taxpayers to shoulder the burden of supporting free and independent media.
Numerous proposals have been put forward in recent years, and principles guiding the implementation of such taxes have been developed. The digital giants and AI firms in particular should contribute to the support of traditional media on the grounds that they should be obligated to pay for a central input into their “production process” and also in line with the accepted principle of “polluter pays” used in other sectors, such as the environment.
Even with fairer compensation models within media markets, a levy of some sort is needed in the context of a market that will always suffer from free-riding and undersupply.
Alternative commercial models (licensing deals, for example) can be useful but will never cover the breadth of information production that underpins modern AI models.
Such taxes address two problems: First, the large digital platforms have been relatively undertaxed on their profits to date, depriving governments of an important source of revenue, and, second, they increase the funding governments have available to support public interest media and other welfare objectives. For example, a levy could be applied on the profits of the largest AI providers, to be collected by a national or multilateral agency, with the proceeds used as strategic capital for media investments.
Action 2
To ensure that public interest media remain fit for purpose in a changing informational environment, governments must put into place a new generation of industrial policies that will shape the wider media ecosystem.
A government approach must take into account the unique characteristics of information as a socially and economically critical public good that is embedded in a commercial landscape. This must be undertaken with stakeholders, including from civil society, to increasing overall productivity and not just the profitability of a few digital platforms.
First, the right sort of regulation is needed as the central pillar of a new industrial policy for public interest media. A popular narrative holds that regulating AI and tech platforms is, in violation of free speech; disrupts fair competition; and will result in less dynamism in the tech sector. These are self-serving arguments by large tech companies that pursue profits at all costs over social welfare.
This narrative and the argument that regulation is a barrier to innovation is rejected. Used appropriately, regulation creates a better information ecosystem to the benefit of our economy, democracies and society; good regulation encourages productive and socially useful innovation. We call on governments to be bolder in insisting on this. For example, mandatory digital disclosures area crucial element in allowing governments to effectively regulate big tech and AI and should be brought into law.
Regulation is important for social welfare, but we argue it is also good for business. AI systems based on flawed information are not going to spearhead any worthwhile information revolution, and governments that wish to support a productive domestic AI sector should work to shape the direction of that sector’s growth as well as the speed of its growth.
Regulating big tech also increases competition and dynamism elsewhere by facilitating market entry for new actors, particularly in a context where standard anti-trust approaches (for instance, focusing on concentration in certain advertising markets) don’t adequately address the underlying issue of needing not only to support competitive media ecosystems but also to ensure they are aligned with wider social welfare needs.
Second, governments and civil society advocates must make more use of existing legal and market levers to create a media infrastructure that is better in line with public interest priorities. This includes the need to update copyright laws (for example, “fair use” clauses) so that they provide meaningful protection in the age of data scraping. Some of us have also explored the concept of a “public option” in media and the potential role of competition authorities in nurturing a more pluralistic and vibrant information environment, including through revised ownership rules and structures. This is also an area where there is a need for greater community and civil society representation and watchdog functions to shape the institutional capacity to promote media institutions that are in the public interest and to even out a media landscape in which big tech power creates a systemic risk for media freedom.
The objective of ensuring a robust and diverse public interest media can also be pursued through business policies aimed at supporting local startups. Ensuring that new businesses and platforms can emerge is key to the future viability of the whole media market, and many of these enterprises will inevitably emerge locally and best be able to cater to local needs — a further plus in a media landscape whose local provision has hollowed out in recent years. It is critical that the media innovations of tomorrow aren’t smothered by unfair competition today before they are up and running.
Targeted and smart industrial policy interventions such as media incubators or preferential treatment for nonprofit actors can play a role here.
Civil society, media organisations and other actors also have a critical role to play in helping to shape the overall media infrastructure and the normative direction of travel that is desired. This same point also applies at the multilateral level, where there is a need to identify common norms and principles that can guide a revised multilateral architecture better adapted to the informational age.
The panel believes these two actions — investing in and shaping the media ecosystem — provide a feasible way ahead that all governments committed to economic growth and democratic prosperity, in dialogue with civil society and the private sector, can engage with at relatively low cost.
This is an edited extract from The Economic Imperative of Investing In Public Interest Media by the High-Level Panel On Public Interest Media.
Signatories:
Prof Daron Acemoğlu, Nobel Prize Economic Sciences 2024, Institute Professor at MIT, Faculty Co-Director of MIT’s Shaping the Future of Work Initiative and a Research Affiliate at MIT’s Blueprint Labs
Prof Philippe Aghion, Professor at the Collège de France, INSEAD and the London School of Economics
Prof. Sir Tim Besley, School Professor of Economics and Political Science and W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics in the Department of Economics at London School of Economics
Prof Dr.Francesca Bria, Honorary Professor IIPP, UCL London, EuroStack Project Leader, Chair, New European Bauhaus Facility, European Commission, President Innovation Agency ART-ER, Italy
Prof Dame Diane Coyle, Benett Professor of Public Policy, University of Cambridge
Dr Obiageli Ezekwesili, President, Human Capital Africa and Founder School of Politics, Policy and Governance
Prof Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, UCL, and Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, IIPP
Prof Atif Mian, John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 Professor of Economics, Public Policy and Finance at Princeton University
Prof Andrea Prat, Richard Paul Richman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, Columbia University
Dr Vera Songwe, Founder and Chair, Liquidity and Sustainability Facility, and Non Resident Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Brookings
Prof Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Economics Sciences 2001, Columbia University, Founder and Co-President Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Chief Economist for the Roosevelt Institute
The high level panel assessed risks to the economy and society of a degraded media caused by AI firms and an outdated business model
