Media Concentration & Platform Regulation: Emerging Lessons from Canada, Switzerland and Selected EU Countries

During this visiting research period, Prof. Winseck and I will work together on a cross-national comparative examination of emerging digital platforms and Internet services regulations in Switzerland, Canada and European Union. At present, this is very fertile ground with countries around the world showing steadily increasing interest in these issues and convening many public inquiries as well as regulatory or judicial reviews that strike on such questions. Some sense of the urgency and breadth of these efforts can be seen in Prof. Winseck’s effort to dynamically track major public policy, regulatory and proceedings around the world, who is working together with Prof. Manuel Puppis (Université de Fribourg) on a list of entries covering the past five years and already well over 100 items long (Winseck & Puppis, 2021). The European Commission’s Digital Services Act (European Commission, 2020a) and Digital Markets Act (European Commission, 2020b), now nearing adoption by the European Parliament, exemplify such efforts, but other well-known examples include Australia’s News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code (Australian Government, 2021), which was adopted last year, and the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Bill (UK Parliament, 2022), now before parliament in that country. In Switzerland, one such effort is the proposed amendment to the cinema law that will be put to a popular vote on May 15, 2022 (Office Fédéral de la Culture, 2022). In Canada, the recently re-elected Liberal Government has a trilogy of measures before Parliament or deep into the stakeholder consultation stage: the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) (Parliament of Canada, 2021a), the Online News Act (Bill C-18) (Parliament of Canada, 2021b) and the Online Harms Consultation (Government of Canada, 2022a, 2022b) now nearing completion, with a bill reflecting the outcomes of the latter expected soon. The unifying themes across these efforts is that an early generation of relatively pro-market, light touch Internet regulation is coming to an end in favour of measures that take aim at: redressing digital market dominance and monopoly power; personal data and privacy protection; a range of measures that extend beyond illegal content to address online activities seen as harming people and society’s well-being (e.g. disinformation, revenge porn, hate speech); and to redress the “crisis of journalism”.These policy developments are driven on by several considerations, including fundamental structural changes to the Internet and digital markets, but also ongoing research and analysis of alleged problems with respect to both. Given the high stakes involved, it is essential to understand the conceptual and empirical foundations of these ongoing policy developments because, ultimately, we are at a cross-roads when the cornerstones of a whole new phase of Internet development and regulation, within countries and worldwide, are being put into place, with enormous implications not just for markets, technology and public policy, but also for how people communicate with one another as well as access fundamental factors of life, such as education, the economy, government services, information and entertainment.Cast in that light, the research we plan to embark on addresses fundamental questions regarding people’s quality of life, the public interest and democracy writ large. This project will allow us to conduct original research together with an eye to developing a “state-of-the-art” survey of current efforts by Switzerland, Canada and other select EU countries to implement a comprehensive, new generation of regulations to cover audiovisual media services delivered over the Internet, digital platforms and their impact on journalism, and online harms. In terms of this new, collaborative project, the countries/regions that we will cover are important because developments in them reflect and embody international policy and regulatory trends. Governments around the world have been seized with the idea that such efforts are now urgently needed, with one public inquiry, major regulatory case or proposed legislation being brought forth after another emerging in the past half-decade or so around the goal of developing a new regime of platform regulation to target market and gatekeeping power, privacy and personal data protection, audiovisual media and culture policy, and a range of online harms, from disinformation and ‘fake news’ to revenge porn and bullying (Winseck & Puppis, 2021). As part of our efforts, we will create an inventory of policy and regulatory developments in each of the countries/regions we cover. This inventory will also help us keep track of fast-moving developments across a number of jurisdictions in a systematic and organized way. This joint project will not only be beneficial for the field (we plan to publish two co-authored articles on the results of this research), but also for both of us as scholars. Prof. Winseck and I have been knowing each others for over a decade, and this visiting research period will help us consolidate our relationship as well as the one we are building between USI and Carleton University in Ottawa (Canada). Close in-person collaboration on a timely and relevant topic such as Internet and platform regulation will also contribute to strengthen both our research activities and allow us to benefit from our respective expertise in different but closely related areas.