Digital News Aggregators, Media Plurality and the Right to Information

Abstract

The advent of the digital economy has brought many challenges to traditional business models, leading to new issues that go beyond pure market problems. This is also true for the news media industry since the emergence and rapid expansion of digital platforms like Google and Facebook. While the latter, in contrast to press publishers, do not produce any news content themselves, they have become digital news aggregators and first contact points for readers of online news. In this post, we reflect on the existing approaches towards addressing the bargaining imbalance between press publishers and digital news aggregators. We argue that the most adequate measure in addressing this imbalance would be a regulatory instrument such as a bargaining code.

Keywords

• Competition Law
• Copyright
• Media Regulation
• Right to Information