Media Sustainability: how to rebalance the market power of media in relation to Big Tech

This Policy Manual highlights how the current digital information ecosystem — dominated by Big Tech platforms (very large social media and search engines, and increasingly also AI companies) — has become increasingly captured in ways that undermine media freedom. It underscores the need for democratic state intervention, based on the rule of law, to ensure an enabling environment for independent and pluralistic journalism.

The Manual offers a vision for healthy online information spaces, where the availability and accessibility of public interest information are ensured. It puts forward mitigation measures and key recommendations for States to implement long-term structural reforms and sustained investments to address the distortions in today’s online information ecosystem.

The recommended mitigation measures cover three key areas:
• Visibility of journalism and public interest information online
• Media viability and funding models that support public interest information
• Vigilance, or the online safety of journalists

The core of this Policy Manual lies in the guidance it provides on how to enable healthy information spaces online by freeing the ecosystem from heavily concentrated gatekeeping power, and instead fostering an enabling environment for media freedom in the algorithmic and artificial intelligence (AI) era.

It concludes that for media freedom to be safeguarded, addressing platform-related challenges alone is not sufficient. Instead, it calls for more ambitious structural reforms — to move beyond merely mitigating media dependency and towards building an independent, pluralistic online information and media landscape that can sustain democratic debate and societal resilience.

This publication is part of the project “Healthy Online Information Spaces – SAIFE Renewed”. It was produced in collaboration with the Forum on Information and Democracy.

Rarely has the need for public interest media been greater. At a time of heightened economic uncertainty and political disruption, the economic and broader societal benefits provided by trusted and independent news organizations are more important than ever.

The Forum on Information and Democracy has convened a High-Level Panel of leading international economists. Their collective statement examines the drivers of this crisis and proposes a concrete plan of action for governments worldwide.

Their analysis not only discusses the political and democratic consequences of free information but also delves deeply into its economic significance – an aspect that has been largely overlooked until now.

At the M20 Summit, an independent initiative focused on integrating media and information integrity into the G20 policy agenda, the Forum on Information and Democracy is releasing its new policy brief that examines the potential of digital service taxes (DSTs) to sustain quality journalism as the financial landscape of the media sector increasingly deteriorates.