Could digital platforms capture the media through infrastructure?

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the news industry and digital platforms, most notably Facebook and Google, through a political economy framework. The theory of regulatory capture suggests that regulators are prone to become captured by the businesses they oversee, whether through financial incentives (such as money transfers and revolving doors) or cognitive/cultural influence (such as advocacy and shared values). The theory was further expanded to suggest that businesses also attempt to capture non-governmental institutions tasked with scrutinizing them, such as the media. This article suggests that Google and Facebook are rapidly expanding their potential capability to do so. Alongside the forms of capture described in the literature, the most crucial element in Google and Facebook’s relationships with news organizations is the fact that they have come to provide the majority of audience for online news and are significant sources of potential growth in viewership. In addition, they equip news organizations with tools for news production, provide them with data on the reach of stories, and offer tools for analytics and insight. All this potentially amounts to a new form of capture that can be called infrastructural capture: circumstances in which a scrutinizing body is incapable of operating sustainably without the physical or digital resources and services provided by the businesses it oversees and is therefore dependent on them. This new category of capture, rooted in the dynamics of contemporary digital news markets, could pose serious challenges to the ability of news organizations to scrutinize the corporations that direct most of the traffic to their sites. Aside from potentially affecting the content of news, another important effect of compromising infrastructural autonomy to non-journalistic third-party actors might be a weakening of the legal protections that journalism benefits from.