Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: The power of platforms and how publishers adapt transcript

good evening everyone as the curator of the lecture series making sense of the digital society and on behalf of the Humboldt Institute for internet society and the federal agency for civic education I have the pleasure to welcome you to this evening's lecture with esteemed guests Rasmus Kleiss Nielson Rasmus and I first met at a conference in Prague in November 2016 in the wake of the US elections and their surprising result like then and just a few months after the prek set vote and it's surprising result in the aftermath of these World votes in the heated processes of sense-making how could that happen social media platforms and they're assumed inherent tendency to spread rumors to foster fragmentation and polarization were quickly found guilty in public and policy discourse in these heated debates debates there were few people who balanced the high public and policy demand for sense-making the quicker and easier the better with a complex and complicated nature of research into these issues and who balanced this better than cosmos in blog posts and Twitter threats in you high-level Commission's and in public events he has regularly regularly contributed evidence and explanations beyond the easy with oryx of fake news and bubbles filter bubbles since now today only four days after another election demanding explanation we are so happy to have you Rasmus for the final lecture in a series this year addressing the big questions the key questions of the digital transformation with rigorous research that's what we thrive for with this lecture serious almost exactly two years ago we started this series with manuel castells and have hosted 15 lectures since and we will be continuing the series into the next year there is such a privilege for being able to invite the most interesting and brilliant academics of the continent to address the thorny questions of our time I especially thank our corporation partner the federal agency for civic education for making this possible and the theater how for this wonderful location so at least I for one I'm looking forward to another set of trillion speakers and pressing issues next years but now I'm looking forward to listen to your lecture cosmos and now I hand over to Tobi Milla the moderator of the lecture series to properly introduce our guest thank you all for coming [Applause] not much introducing to be having to be done by me I guess after this you already get a quite a clearer picture of our renown guests tonight how do we access media have you heard the news today on social media where else of course on platforms that then refers to the new site or some form of it sometimes there's still a shadow blue in the margins maybe maybe the typeface in the header looks familiar or if your phone is old and slow like mine until a week ago you saw it blink just for a second Twitter analytics Facebook analytics that doesn't happen with my new phone anymore I don't know what happened there maybe it's just too fast so I do both access probably all of you access news by referral or search but also directly to websites I check regularly on a daily basis maybe I'm old school having been an editor at newspapers in the art section you know it's in the very far back of the paper or way down below the last native ads if you scroll down but the benefits in terms of reach are even to me also very clear to see in the platform economy so let me start it a little bit more of a personal note here a couple of months ago I've wrote an article that compared create attune back with the singer Billy Eilish saying these extraordinary teenagers were heralds of a paradigm shift in pop music both a rather moody and timid at times what most normal teenagers are in fact that teen pop stars have never been allowed to be that and almost all teen stars had been sexualized most of them outrightly oversexed but not tuned back nor Eilish I had fun writing it but did not think that much of it was just another text you know on the brink of cultural analysis and pop music then he got all of a sudden about half a million views in almost 800 comments and the new site this is not even what you would call going viral far from it however compared to the average reach print articles in the art section usually a four in my case had this of course was equal to a landslide half a million readers in the art section never ever important for the last hundred fifty thousand views or so was an aggregator called pockets that promoted the text under the search engine embedded in Firefox for example you know the browser pocket in turn is sensitive to movement and Twitter or just word of mouth but what does a digital word of mouth actually so people told me afterwards you know mostly people who knew by rumor who have heard something basically I still do not know exactly what happened or how it happened and who made how much money offered the only thing I know for certain it wasn't me this was an attempt to broadly introduce you to tonight's topic the power of platforms in how media adapts to it on a more personal as scientific note science of course is the turf of our guests tonight communication science today he is the directors of the Reuters Institute for the Study of journalism at the University of Oxford and a professor of political communication and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of press politics Danish by birth he studied political theory in Copenhagen and Essex at Columbia University he got his PhD in communications in his own words from his rich and helpful blog I really recommend to you I quote most of my research deals with a news media organizations and their ongoing transformations be changing forms of digital media used in political and news related contexts and see political communication and campaigning practices the latter campaign practices is the subject of his first monograph Ground Wars personalized communication and political campaign campaigns floral at Princeton University Press which won him the Doris graver award given by the American Political Science Association to the best book published in political communication in the last 10 years his Twitter wall is also an excellent way of getting to know him in a bit more detail no animal content though as far as I could check so or I should say a good way of getting to know his work on what he deems worthy of our attention did you know for one thing that the talk of the filter bubble does not really hold up to research any more because contrary to fears of filter bubbles we find that reliance and various social media and search engines in fact drive people to more and more diverse sources of news through incidental exposure and automated serendipity it you also know that by now only a 1/3 of users go directly to the publisher sites to access news did you also know that I'm not making this up but I'm still quoting from his Twitter wall speaking of which we have a Twitter wall tonight there's the hashtag digital society there you can ask questions during the talk during this introduction during the conversation we're going to have one on one for maybe 20 minutes after his talk that are going to be some of them are going to be read out to you and your audience there's also two microphones is always here in the venue for your questions to be taken and answered I hope so should you have the impression that this is going to be a facebook life feat after all this talk about platforms you are mistaken please welcome now in the flesh flown in from far and farther away England Erasmus Kleiss Nielsen welcome [Music] [Applause] I'm not gonna lie I could sit there and listen to myself be introduced like that all night um I suppose I have to sing for my supper I want to say just two things by way of introduction I run something called the R artist Institute for the Study of journalism at the University of Oxford in my daily job and I think there was out of two maybe two things to to know about the personal and professional side of that job that I want to preface this with a dumb bit jump in our mission is the Institute is to explore the future of journalism worldwide and my personal connection to that is quite different from most of the people I work with in the sense that I've never been a journalist myself my formative experience of journalism is I was the kind of kid who would leave the school in my village to walk home during the lunch break and read the local paper which arrived just before noon and then walk back to school to have my evening classes but my first professional encounter with news was not writing I was a newspaper delivery boy in the morning in Denmark which I can tell you in the winter is rather cold and wet and sometimes quite snowy and later on I sold newspapers via phone telemarketing which I sometimes tell my colleagues these experiences when the 90s may mean I have a somewhat less rosy view of print journalism than some of the people who did the writing that I sold and distributed the professional thing I think you should know before I dive into this is that the Reuters Institute is part of the University of Oxford but we work with a wide range of different partners and funders which include both media organisations like the BBC and many others as well as media regulators like off come in the UK but also technology companies like Google and I say that because I think we live in a world where there are many different complex interests at play and sometimes there are conflict of interest that may be real or perceived and I wanted to be clear who we work with and what our mission is before I jump into this talk to each of you can think about that when you listen to the argument that I will present to you tonight so what is that argument what I will talked about tonight is the power of platforms and about how publishers are adapting to that and what that might tell us about what kind of society is we live in today and where they might be heading in the future and what your role is in that future or could be in that future if you should decide so by platform companies I mean companies like Google Amazon Facebook and Apple so large technology companies that have delivered and maintained digital platforms that enable interactions between at least two different kinds of actors normally us as individual end-users and then a number of third parties that normally include at least advertisers and third-party developers and marketers but in the case of these consumer facing platforms also you include publishers like newspapers broadcasters and digital porn organizations that present their content via these intermediaries to us as end-users so in the process of running these digital platforms the companies come to host public information they organize access to it they create new formats for it and they control data about it and they're bought by they influence the incentives around investment in public communication political communication but also specifically news production which I'll talk about today now before I launch into talking about the case that I want to work through with you tonight I think it's worth recognizing that even as most of us see each of these companies in isolation as powerful behemoths that's of a loom large over many parts of our digital existence and indeed they are large behemoths that loom large over many parts of our digital experience and lives they are also at the same time faced with each other in what then Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2011 you know I think a quite a revealing moment called the platform Wars these companies I think we need to remember are engaged in what we could see as probably the largest stake corporate battle in human history in that many of the dynamics of the online environment our winner takes most dynamics at a global scale so the winner takes most takes a lot indeed and these companies increasingly are competing with each other in many many different areas even at each of them also dominate a particular set of the digital economy and our digital lives so if we want to think about the rise of platforms in particular there our relationship with publishers I think I need we need to really start with us journalism exists in the context of its audience the political significance of journalism its social importance the sustainability of the business of news the legitimacy of arrangements like public service media depend on a connection between publishers and members of the public and increasingly the platforms are the companies that serve as that intermediary and control the access to us the public the online audience as Toby alluded to in his introduction this year when we surveyed online news users in 38 markets across the world and asked people amongst the many different ways in which they say that they find the nexus news online which one is their main way of accessing news online only 29% identify going direct to the apps or websites of news publishers and more than two-thirds identify various forms of site door access like search engines social media mobile alerts aggregators and emails so in 2019 we already now live in a world in which if we look just that the ones that are relying various forms of algorithmic curation namely search social and aggregators more than half for lie and various forms of algorithmic selection and less than half rely primarily on editorial curation by professionals these are choices that we make individually and in the aggregate as members of the public and I'd bet my bottom dollar that if I had tracking software installed in your phones I would find that many of you to engage probably willingly probably with some enjoyment of the convenience the use of access and the many affordances in these very practices so we are the ones if you will that are driving a fundamental shift in the relationship that publishers have with us as the public they move from a world in which almost all of us when we got professionally produced news got it by going directly to the channel controlled by the content provider to a world in which the content still comes from professional providers but the channels increasingly are controlled by digital intermediaries by the platform companies largely operating for profit and out of the United States and because we individually and in the aggregate as members of the of the online audience and of the public choose to spend our time in this way and rely on these companies as a consequence we're spending a large part of our time with them and the advertisers that historically funded journalism not because they cared about journalism but because they cared about our attention and now following us to where our attention is going names are the platform companies so by now two companies alone Google and Facebook account for a very large share of the global market of online digital advertising more than half in fact and of the top 10 sellers of digital advertising there are nine platform companies and one media and telecommunication company Verizon not a single publisher we are choosing platforms and the advertisers who were never interested in news never interest in journalism only interested in our attention and selling things to us are following us to the platforms and the collateral damage in this development is the traditional business of news that was heavily reliant on subsidies from advertisers of the cost that we paid at the point of consumption free for broadcast and limited for print did not bear the full cost of producing the news that we relied on this money is now going elsewhere because we are going elsewhere and publishers are left to deal with these relatively new entrants that have become so powerful in such a relatively short span of time in the grander scheme of things so how do we think of the power of platforms I think there are sort of two things we need to think about here want to see what is the nature of this power and the second one is how its exercised so before I turn to the question of how that powers that have works in practice I think it's worth recognizing a few things about the power of platforms the first is as with any form of power there is no neutral way to exercise it power is the capacity to make a difference and differences make a difference it is not easy to be neutral and there is no point that would be accepted by everyone as one of perfect neutrality if you have a very powerful actor I think we can all think of examples like that the state for example courts you might be impartial you might exercise your power in ways that ensure accountability intelligibility you might exercise your power in waves we find legitimate or individually might even find just but there is no fully neutral way to exercise great power power makes a difference the two further things about the nature of this power I think is worth highlighting is first I think that the power of platforms is relational it is powered by if you will us as billions of end-users we make platforms powerful it is also powered by the millions of third parties advertisers developers marketers but also publishers who engage with the platforms and serve up things that we as end-users find and engage with so power here is very relational and I think this is a crucial point in in stark contrast to the industrial behemoths of the 20th century platform companies control not the means of production but the means of connection this is a relational form of power that's quite different from assessed forms of power furthermore I think we should recognize and I say this nas as a sort of an unalloyed positive thing but just as a feature a descriptive feature of this power is that the power of platforms is highly generative it enables things that would be harder and sometimes even impossible without them so you could say for example that the development of the Internet of the World Wide Web has made information available but is the emergence of successful platform companies that has made that information accessible and actionable think about how many billions of websites there are think about how many billions of people are online and think about how much easier search and social media and messaging application makes it to communicate with or access information or act upon information or engage with information so this is the generative nature of platforms I'm not saying this is an unalloyed good in itself but I think it's important to recognize if we want to understand how this power works so what kind of power just platforms and exercise what is the practical workings of this power well I mean I think there are some forms of power here that we know very well from a you know a century or more of social science research platform companies when they are successful of course frantically we should recognize most of them fail but the ones that succeed grow very large they exercise forms of power that many large organizations exercise the exercise hard power they have direct influence they have money to spend they engage in lobbying they can lean on entities like any other large and powerful organization they have hot power they also have though perhaps somewhat diminished with critical public scrutiny in recent years at least for some of the individual companies forms of soft power fuel power that is not about directly influencing people and making them do things that wouldn't done otherwise but it's about attracting people and entities co-opting people and making them work with you soft forms of power that again many other organizations exercise to publishers for example have hot power and soft power - I would venture to suggest that both we as members of the public but also politicians treat for example a newspaper with greater deference then we would a similar sized furniture company so newspapers - and publishers to have soft power but platforms also I would argue have something that is more distinct and I will call this platform power and I will run through sort of five aspects that I think characterize this form of power and the way in which is exercised which i think is distinct to the kind of companies that I'm talking about tonight first of all platforms have the power to set standards on the digital platforms that they create and control they set both technical standards and social standards community standards Terms of Service and the like and they can set these in ways that reward or penalize certain kinds of behavior in ways that they will say serve their end-users and thus their business model but of course will have consequences for different actors who are on the platforms this is just one example from Google as the largest of the consumer-facing platform companies not always as large as Microsoft or Apple but in terms of reach with the public argue large of these companies and is the policy called first click free and the way in which Google search for a long time essentially required publishers who want to be indexed to make the content available for the first click even for nonsubscribers even if they had a paywall now for publishers this seems quite interventionist and not particularly welcome Google would say that this was a case in which Google had made an exemption to publishers try to give them benefits that were not afforded to anyone else because this winix was an exemption from Google's general what's called anti cloaking policy that you cannot show different things to the search engine BOTS from what you serve to users but publishers felt this was a company in California dictating their terms a trade with their end users is an example of how a company can set standards and if you're a third party take it or leave it these are the terms secondly platforms exercise their platform power by making or breaking connections so a company like Google several hundreds of times every year will update the algorithms to power the search results for example that each of you have probably relied on several times today for various things in your life of greater or lesser importance and again as the company in particular in the early years would often recognize it's become slightly more guarded than its rhetoric recently it would often recognize that there are no neutral ways of doing these things when you change automated standards and algorithms there are winners and losers and sometimes the winners are sigh that others see as quality and sometimes they're not this is just one example from the so called panda update which was a change that privileged original reporting and penalized sites that reused constants originally produced and published by others this was marginally increasing the search traffic to quite a lot of established publishers and had a dramatic negative effect on the search traffic to so-called content farms like demand media a company that briefly was worth more than the New York Times but after Google introduced the Panda update essentially imploded on the new york stock exchange so very clear power and one in this case that actually helped establish publishers marginally even as others of cost felt the negative impact of the change these connections that the platforms make rely on automated action at scale this is a fully automated process it will make probabilistic decisions and the basis of a range of signals including personal data collected from each of us as individual users this of course is the only way in which a company like Google can percent you know a hundred and sixty four million results for a search query of automated action to scale in less than a second right this is the only way in which this is possible and this is distinct from other forms of power that we have known in the past the ability to do these things is something new and something distinct in our societies and of course it works not only for us as end-users searching for something it also works for the people who want to reach us so there's automated action it's scale at the advertising end two of the people who want to reach us right so this is just an interface of what the ad serving interface looks like if I wanted to buy at trying to reach you through Google search forth the platform's have a power of we can crudely call it secrecy or sort of capacity if you will they try to sort of explain a little bit about how search works this is a very nice infographic from Google of how search works so it's all crystal clear right a split second before you search they index over X number of pages and then they've been over 1 million something and then su search and the right the result and it's all crystal clear isn't it right now of course there are there are there are self-interested and more principle reasons for why they have secrecy the self-interest ones have quite clear these are commercial companies this is how they make their money like most other private companies they want to protect their IP this is quiet you may not like it but it's quite reasonable if you will there's slightly more principled one that they will often trot out but I don't think it's always disingenuous even though it is self-interested is to say well you know if this process was entirely transparent who would benefit the most from that transparency us as end-users or the various bad actors that we have seen time and again in recent years try to influence our elections corrupt the public reputation and individuals or companies or the like so who would really benefit from that transparency this is a question the companies are fond of asking finally in the fifth aspect we should recognize the platform power often operates across domains right this is just a small subset of the different products and services offered by Google and of course many of these power each other across so data collected through Gmail may power advertising and search results that in turn may inform display decisions in YouTube that in turn may reform and on and on it goes like these things can cross subsidize each other at the bag and often through data but also through other resources so these companies will have a tendency to spread if you will quite sensibly again but often the ways they can be quite sort of challenging for those around them so these are the five aspects of platform power that I have highlighted the power to set standards the power to make or break connections the power of automated action at scale power of secrecy and power that operates across domains now if large platform companies like Google and Facebook but also smaller ones of course Twitter snapchat increasingly chinese-owned ones like tic toc and others coming out of mainland China if they have this type of power exercises type of power what do they want from publishers why would they care about publishers well I would suggest to you that they care about publishers because as I said at the outset that platform power is relational we power them but party's power them as well so what do platforms want from publishers they want access to content journalists would prefer the term journalism or or perhaps news but content is the term of art in the industry they want the ability to rely on automation right they don't want to make human curated decisions about every display decision that's too expensive for their business model which relies on making a high profit margin on very low value large number of transactions they want the opportunity to collect data and they want control over the user experience and the product what do they offer in return for this you might ask if you were a publisher why would you allow access to these companies to your content we should remember that for search for example it's trivially easy for a webmaster to prevent the indexing of a website from google search for example that's just inserting one line of HTML of robot exclusion protocol done this is a choice you can make so why don't they do it well what are the platform's offers publishers and here I think it's interesting to go back because I think it's been quite clear for some time but they offer this is a quote from Eric Schmidt but then Google CEO more than ten years ago we've decided the dilution itself is interesting we've decided that the value we provide to the partners is the traffic we get access to content you get access to audiences where does that believe the publishers well around the same time and it's part of the same debate that Smit offered this observation in Rupert Murdoch the executive chairman of news core one of the more vocal critics of the platform companies set we have entered an epochal debate over the value of content so how if publishers respondent in this epochal debate over the value of constant which I think they're right to say that we are in well first of all I think we should recognize they haven't all reacted the same so there are sort of three basic types of responses if you will you can say some publishers try to collaborate with the platform's the CEO of one major uk-based publisher says this can be win-win in interviews conducted by Sara and Gander from Simon Fraser University in Canada myself as part of our research but for the vast majority of publishers that we interviewed for this research where we spoke to more than 50 different editorial and commercial leaders and news organizations in different countries collaboration is not really an option because there's not necessarily any one of the platform companies who have the time to talk to you and the observation is this rather dryly mate by the editor of a regional newspaper in Germany that's really remain nameless since we promised the interviewees and the limousine we need Facebook Facebook does not need us so this is coexistence they are there we are here and we just have to sort of find our way in this world and we have no direct relationship with them really then finally of course we have confrontation and this is language the colorful language of Rupert Murdoch who has ironically one might say on another platform Twitter often called the bigger platform companies like Facebook and Google Content kleptomaniacs thieves and a number of other colorful things how do these responses inform the day-to-day decision-making in the publishing organizations that most of us rely on the for our news well again there is not one response I think we can sort of think of a range of different strategies if you will for the ways in which news organizations have engaged with the platforms there are those on the Left who pursue what we can call an onside strategy their primary purpose when they engage with the platforms is to take you and your attention from one of the platforms and then use the products and services offered by that platform whether it's Facebook or Google or Twitter or something else entirely to lead them to lead you to the app or website of the publisher themselves on site that's where they want you and from from their point of view of the platforms our marketing channels nothing more this is what they want the other strategy we might think of as off site this is the strategy with media part the French digital born news organization in The Times of London the legacy newspaper in the you okay are examples of on-site strategy The Guardian is another legacy newspaper a BuzzFeed as a digital born organization might be examples of publishers who pursued an offside strategy who would say well we need to be where the audience is and if the audience is off site if the audience is on Facebook on YouTube on Twitter we need to be there and then once we are there and have their attention we will find ways of monetizing that to support our editorial ambitions we will seek them where they are we will not build them they will come we will seek them where they are I think it's really important to underline that these choices matter the choices that publishers matter make they matter they make a difference in terms of the results that we see we track this in a very granular fashion I'll just quickly show you some data from the UK where we passively track the people's consent the clicks of a representative sample of UK online news users for a month to see what news they used and because we can see each URL we can see what they click on before they click on a news story so if they go from Facebook to the BBC or from Google search to The Guardian we have a reasonable inference that they arrived at the news story from either social or search how does that break down from different publishers well I'll just highlight a few here the BBC by far the most widely used source of online news in the UK more than 80% of its traffic came direct directly to it and less than 20% was reliant on platforms sending traffic to the BBC similarly Sky News more than 60 percent direct traffic then the Daily Mail and mid-market newspaper popular newspaper more than 50 percent direct traffic so you know getting 20 or 30 percent of the Daily Mail's traffic from search or social that's a lot of traffic but the majority came direct then there are other sides and in a very very different position if you look at the Sun a tabloid newspaper akin to built at the bottom at the time the Sun got less than 20% of his traffic direct highly highly reliant on search and social they were seeking the audience where similar to the independent now only online but at the time also a print title again very limited direct traffic highly highly reliant insurgent social be these are very different very very substantially different results from different strategies now of course the relationship that publishers have with the platform companies by now have grown well beyond just the question of audience reach of our attention increasingly the platform companies in large part because they compete for attracting not only us but also the publishers who enrich the platforms have developed a wide range of different products where the publishers the customers are using products and services provided by the companies that they also make their content available to so to track this we did a study after gdpr was introduced where we just track what are the third-party elements and cookies that load when you load major news sites and we looked at more than 200 major news sites across the EU after gdpr was introduced what loads before you click any consent buttons and what we find of course is that the platform's by now are totally intertwined with the websites of most major publishers so after gdpr was introduced in July last year we found that 96% of major news sites of more than 200 major news sites across the European Union contained third-party content from Google from different parts of Google 70% contain third-party content from Facebook 57% contain third-party content for Madison all of these choices are made by publishers themselves to integrate things from Facebook like the Facebook ad pixel from Google like Google Analytics or various Google advertising services these are choices publishers make to rely on the technology and infrastructure provided by the platform companies it's about support for subscriptions it's about a variety of different tools provided by the platforms now from the point of view of publishers this might seem perplexing right you know we've just seen that Rupert Murdoch more than 10 years ago is that we have any poke hole debate over the value of content he's very concerned about the influence and growth of these bad phone companies and yet we can see that his son for example with a you know no no his son relies heavily on search and social we can see that most publishers integrate lots of different tools from these companies that they also compete with for attention in advertising so why is this I think this is an interesting puzzle so here are some components to an answer what are these relations like in practice well drawing on the interviews we did with editors and executives from news organizations across the world here are four observations about what the relationship in practices from the point of view of publishers first there is a tension between the operational and strategic short term the benefits that come with collaborating with their platforms are obvious it gives you greater audience reach this audience Reach is valuable from an editorial point of view you want to reach the public to make a difference to spread the word about your journalism it has commercial value generates advertising it generates opportunities for selling subscriptions and many other commercially valuable things there are very clear short-term operational reasons to collaborate with the platforms they offer offer very real opportunities now of course there is a tension between that and then a longer-term strategic worry about essentially as many people would say sort of build your house and somebody else's ground every publisher we interviewed full well know that what the algorithm gives the algorithm can take away right they all know all the different examples that we have come across of demand media or up worth your other suffering group changes of this of that algorithm from that'll vist or that platform and knowing this they go in because the incentives are clear they go in with open eyes taking on the platform risk in return for the platform reward now the decision is informed by something I think we can recognize at an individual level which is the fear of missing out right a lot of this discussion in industry circles is influenced by sort of coverage in the trade press where prominent CEOs or editors from different publishers will appear and very glowingly about the results they've achieved from working with one platform company or another and then our interviewees would tell us literally that what they get it they'll get an email at 1:00 a.m. in the morning from their CEO saying what is our snapchat strategy or what is our tick-tock strategy or what are you doing an Instagram so the fear of missing out when there is a sense that there is proof of concept from other publishers is driving a lot of these decisions then of course it's actually hard to evaluate whether publishers are getting a return their investment because of the secrecy that I described before a lot of the metrics that are released are quite limited a lot of the data is not very granular it can be quite hard for the publish to assess are they actually getting the return that they expect from their investments in working with the platforms and yet there they are because of the fear of missing out because of the short term objectives they are they're collaborating as we speak finally our interview is of course would say that these are very asymmetrical relationships the platforms are very big most publishers by comparison are very small and all of news combined in most countries is only something like 3 percent of the time we spend online so even a 3% of Google's business or Facebook's business is adds up to quite a bit the weight of any one individual publisher in that relationship is limited if you will so what the publishers want from these platforms if these are the practical aspects of their relationship well they want audience reach they want the opportunity to convert and they want brand recognition as Toby suggested again they want you to remember who produced the news even if you found it through Facebook or through Google search or on YouTube and the like now they would like more than that they would like more editorial control over whether you remember the brand they would like more data they would like more opportunities for monetization but ultimately this will do audience reach opportunity convert and brand recognition why do we know this will do because today more than 10 years after Rupert Murdoch announced as a poke hole debate over the value of content where are we we are where even the publishers like Axel Springer and like News Corps who've been the most vocal critics of the platform companies are collaborating with them every day and you can go to the website of built right now and you can find at the bottom of it at the end of you can find the links of the social media accounts you can look through the HTML and see how built - to ensure that their audience that their journalism reaches an audience is working with search engine optimization you can see how all of these companies continue to work with the platforms you can see how they engage when the platforms offer new products and services like voice assistance that Google is developing or various video formats as Facebook's developing or chat BOTS on messaging applications like Facebook Messenger or or perhaps new aggregators when they are launched as well so more than 10 years after Murdoch announced this debate we are in a place where the publishers have accepted essentially the terms of trade which are you give us access to content we give you access to audiences even if they would want more this is what they're gonna get and this is what they've accepted so where does that leave us and this is the last thing I'll talk about before we open up the more conversational part of this there are really two different ways of giving a talk like this where one tries at the best of one sort of modest ability or in this case might modest ability even though I rely on the work of many others including great team members from the Institute in the elsewhere where one tries to sir 2% and analysis of a big and complex structural change underway in our societies and if we want to think of sort of past parallels to what we witnessing now with the rise of platforms I think at the very least we were talking about something similar to the rise of television perhaps some would say something similar to the rise of the printing press and for wider analogies perhaps something like industrialization or the Industrial Revolution something lot of that order I think so that gives us a sense of the magnitude of the structural changes underway in our public sphere so there are really two different ways of talking about something like that in a in a setting like this you know one can try as I've tried tonight to identify some key features and then end with an exclamation point these are the features and this is what you should think about them that's our morality tale often told in black and white there is another way I think of telling a story like this which is still to try to identify some key features as I have tried to do tonight but end with a question mark and not tell you what I think you should think but ask you what you think of what I've told you so I will end with a question mark or a set of question marks about the implications and offer them for your consideration I think that the rise of platforms has a set of consequences been described I think with great penetrating analytic ins analytical insight by a hoe safe and I can drag authors I know who say was one of the speakers in this series in the past and I'm honored to be in a lineup that includes her an implication that's about individual empowerment the dependency all of us as individuals are empowered by the platform companies that's why we use them they allow us to do things we would like to do they make those things easier more convenient more compelling and we use them because they empower us even as in that process we've become more dependent upon them I shudder at the thought of what would happen if G Google Drive or Gmail shut down tomorrow I have outsourced much of my life really a comfortable amount of my life in some ways to some of these companies but I do it knowingly they empower me even as I become more dependent upon but what I think we are seeing here and what I've tried to describe tonight is a further step beyond that because I think what we're seeing is an institutional equivalent dynamic of empowerment and dependency publishers too are becoming empowered by and dependent upon platform companies publishers to like you or you or me engage with the platforms because they allow them to do things they would like to do knowing all the time that they are also becoming dependent upon them in many ways they're accepting the platform risk in pursuit of the platform reward and I think the question essentially is given that this development I think is driven not just by technology though also technology but is driven by our individual choices and the aggregate of those choices and the choice of our institutions in our societies I have seen for example even as EU commissioners talked about the evils of political micro-targeting I've been able to go in and look at the Facebook profiles of the European Commission itself using the same tools right that they were you know knocking in their speeches right there it's not just publishers with political campaigns as interest groups as many others are becoming empowered and dependent on these companies even as our individual and aggregate choices and SS end-users and institutions are producing these things these choices over time become structures and I think the question of percents for thus is an urgent need for a discussion of platform governance how do we ensure that our future is not simply driven by the aggregate of individual consumer choices or individual institutional choices but is subject to some form of discussion not just of what platforms we have but also what kinds of platforms do we want in our societies so that's where I really want to end is that it's our choices that make the platform's powerful and no matter the fortunes the rise in potential fall of any one platform we have right now the fact that all the major advertisers or sellers of advertising apart from one our platform suggest that even if some were broken up or for some reason you know turned belly-up tomorrow other platforms would succeed so I think we are in a world where the culture and economics and technology underpin the platforms that they are here to stay it's really the question I want to leave all of you with is given what you've heard elsewhere given what you've read and given what I've said tonight how do you think we should respond thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you so much for us miss for this very hands-on presentation which gives us a lot of food for thought for this one-on-one conversation now for about 20 minutes I think then to open it up for the audience let me start with um I think central term in your talk which I thought to be choice you started out with the phrase saying we are choosing platforms and stressing our own individual roles we play actually in empowering the platforms and you ended you know with the implications that we're all sort of you know complicit with that even publishing publishing companies are empowering platforms even you Commission's are empowering platforms this implicitness or this so-called choice and I am not sure if choice is really the right word if being implicit complicit I'm sorry if being complicit with the phenomenon is really choice let me or let us maybe think back a little bit to the nineties when the publishers try to keep up with you know with the internet and I failed like the music industry failed 10 years before the publishers they just failed because they didn't invest enough I mean it you know it holds up to this day the pay gap between people working for the online departments of big publishing houses and the ones of working for the print is still huge I mean it's ridiculous actually but it's still there 20 20 years after the fact so wouldn't you say that many publishers actually made many grave mistakes in that process that sort of led to the point where we are now where you will have to say yes if they failed that's why they're dependent on the platform's couldn't it have turned out differently actually thanks I'm really glad you asked that question because I think that's a point I probably should have dwelled on more to illustrate why that's an important point for me I think what we will see unclose for inspection is that it has turned out differently for those publishers who made different choices and I want to be very very clear I I am NOT second-guessing other people's work this is difficult stuff people were doing difficult things in a very uncertain environment under great pressure so not passing judgment on individuals here or even on companies but I think is really really important to recognize that the choice is made by different institutions led to different results if we don't see that we arrive at a conclusion of what I would think of as unjustified determinism and I think unjustified determinism leads to passive acceptance and a surrendering of the ability we have collectively not individually but collectively to change the world we live in now some people think of that as volunteerism I think of that as an analysis there are situation in which choices do not make a difference sadly this is not one of them you also talked about you know the the fight between an operational logic of media you know getting the product out on as many platforms as possible just increasing your reach versus strategic logic you know what you talked about that the end customers move away from home turf to other places not governed or not controlled by the publishing houses this is a battle on a purely corporate level so to speak do you think there's a point for government or state actually can come into play here to ensure something like diversity or independence of media when it comes down you know a really buoyant boils down to who is kind of in this fight then it is a fight between operational watching and strategic logic that sort of clash in there I mean this is a really the reason why I end with a question mark rather than an exclamation point I'm happy to share my views in this but I think it's fundamentally as a question a classic question of public policy where I would just hope if if if we do one thing collectively tonight I will hope that every one of you when you leave this room think about that question what role do you think the state with its advantages and its disadvantages of its ability to intervene in a private marketplace should play in something like this and and I'm happy to I'm not shy about sharing my personal views but I'm actually more interested in each of you thinking about that and also thinking about how important you feel that is compared to other things you care about when you cast your vote for example you know there are meaningful differences and issues like this I guess my personal view is that I think it's important there in a democratic society where the political class and the government has a demonstrated commitment to free speech and where there are high levels of institutional integrity so in a country like Germany but not some of our neighbors within the European Union sadly I think in a society like that I think the state can play a legitimate and constructive role in structuring a media space in a way that guarantees individuals fundamental rights to both receive and impart information I really want to stress that what I'm about to say does not apply to states that do not respect those fundamental rights but in such states like Germany I think the state can play a constructive role it can do it by creating more robust institutions than the market does on its own public service as well as direct and indirect support for private publishers these policy tools are available if policymakers wants to use them it's very simple I mean you can you know download our latest report that describes them in with great clarity so the state can create more robust institutions the state can also help to create a competitive marketplace where there is effective competition oversight if there are examples of abusive dominant position that those are corrected and acted against if there are are structural issues that prevent competition not just in the market before the market that for example access to data is opened up and meaningful oversight is exercised I think such more shall we say effective competition enforcement would benefit all all of us not always all publishers because of course competition law is not to protect incumbents it's to protect competition but whether the state should pass judgment on the quality or worth sort of worth wildness of individual pieces of content this I am personally quite uncomfortable with this is a view that some people hold including some people I respect a lot Francis can't cross I should refer to as as Dame Francis came across published a report suggesting that something she called a news quality obligation should be imposed upon dominant intermediaries to surface quality content I suppose the question that I have is who would get to decide what is quality for me and with this body that would make this decision be able to determine that in a way that was impartial and that would serve me as well as it serves my nephew who's a plumber and may have different informational needs and desires and me and with this buddy be able to exercise that in a way that power in a way that was seen as legitimate and impartial by the public at large or would it be seen as yet another attempt by establishment you know conspiracies to fix the system against outsiders as we see right now Donald Trump and many other prominent politicians are attacking the platform companies for allegedly conspiring against them without any evidence of course so I'm personally quite uncomfortable to that last kind of intervention where the state or some organ created by the state gets to determine what is right for each of us to see but the more structural phenomena I think we have a number of tools that I personally you know think can be usefully applied in this situation I'm glad you mentioned yes I'm glad you mentioned some of our neighbors and here because I think that would be really a tough call to make in the process of time right I mean governments that sort of guarantee free speech and others that are slowly moving towards something that clearly voices more authoritarian fantasies so to speak I mean what's been happening in Poland for example is very hard to judge right now in Hungary it's much more clear right but in Poland it's it would be a tough call so that's a distinction somewhat has to draw before you even can answer that question so to speak but that would be really hard but let's come back to the term of platforms you mean you've write about that in one of your papers we all know that of course to the platform suggests the term platform such as openness you know neutrality something like a Agora a public sphere and so forth clearly that is not really the case anymore with all the big you know the big five Google Facebook games and Apple and Microsoft what would be a better term to actually describe platforms from your experience um I mean I think it's a bad habit of social sciences to like sort of condor needlessly complex $10 words for $2 ideas but if I were to conjure a $10 word for a $2 idea then then I think intermediary is a term that strikes me as more precise to use I think the battle is over and and and and I would rather use a term that people might be familiar with from everyday language platform if that's the term that resonates with people I don't know whether that works in German or whether it resonates with you but in the English language by now this is the standard term and it would be you know it would be coy to call them intermediaries in English I could call you know newspapers you know for profit you know publishing operations with a legacy of putting ink on that trees like I mean sure but that would be more precise but you know it's kind of distracting from the fundamental point so I think platforms will do with when we recognize that the metaphor is not without its limitations if two thirds are probably soon 75% of news traffic so to speak goals you know through platforms or comes from platforms more likely if they platform builders are of course like you wrote at another in another paper also actors with interests of their own who engage directly with other actors I mean some people would suggest that we call them publishers to increase the accountability of the method so it will be a political move you think of publisher for plaintiff I mean it's actually quite interesting to see how the companies themselves have in sometimes with charming directness and sometimes an unguarded motion moments you know describe themselves in in these terms it's worth some time for those with an antiquarian interest who read for example the original IPO documents when Google in public where the company describes itself as from memory and advertising product technology and media company all rolled into one and of course also on some calls with investors Sheryl Sandberg has I think on at least one occasion referred to Facebook Facebook as a publisher now I think this is an area where I would just encourage policy makers and those who are lobbying policymakers try to think through quite carefully what would follow if we were to legally classify them as such which is if we were in a situation where a company like Facebook or Google could to be held legally liable from the moment of publication for anything that appeared anywhere on any of their products and services not just a notice and takedown system as currently exist where they are of course liable but not from the moment of publication what would follow from that well if for example a tabloid newspaper published something potentially libelous you know with the platform companies be willing to take the risk that you could sue them in California for very considerable damages for someone else just potentially liable as content and if they were not willing to take that risk what would the information look like we were able to access via these platforms and I think we I mean that I think is really quite important to think through I would suggest to you that there are already many forces that are incentivizing the platforms to move in the direction of a much more restrictive approach to what kind of information and activity they allow on their platforms some of those forces I think are justified and benign some of them less so but I think this but I would be quite worried about there are a lot of things that are potentially illegal that if you could sue the platform companies for them the moment they appeared on there as far as the services they would simply err on the side of caution and and a lot of speech would be censored I don't think there is another word for it including a lot of things that I think from a legal point of view are free speech because we should remember of course that the fundamental rights of free expression is extended to covering things that are shocking things that are offensive things that are disturbing and also statements that may not be true so what would be can you give us some example some concrete examples what you think would not be justified and would still fall under the act of free speech because of course people as you know are concerned with hate speech are concerned with racism are concerned with I guess right-wing populism very takes on an activists approach so to speak a terrorist approach even on the Left also I mean let me take an example that may resonate here this is a lay understanding so if there are lawyers in the room please correct me if I'm making mistakes here as I understand that German law treats defamation and insults to foreign heads of state differently from other forms of insulting defamation there was a rather prominent case of this not so long ago the comedian you mean with a comedian who made some rather crude jokes about a gentleman who was thin-skinned in these respects he said do you think yes that could be Turkey and I think you just have to think about what would that have looked like that thin-skinned gentlemen who have rather considerable resources including legal resources at his disposal could go after the tech companies what how would they deal with things like that or for example I'm from Denmark originally for a long time in Denmark blasphemy was a form of criminal speech now in practice he was not actually enforced but in principle it was if we had had Rivlin of a network enforcement act a lots of explicit sort of explicit forms of expression in English for example would in principle potentially be criminal and and the way in which this has not had any actual consequences is that no one in their right mind has tried to prosecute someone for blasphemy for a long time in Denmark but if you could go after a large company far away over any piece of potential systemic expression anywhere and in the product or service they have in Denmark I mean imagine what content moderation would look like so again and I really want to stress this is just my view right and it doesn't matter at all what I think I'm just a citizen what's really really important now is that we are facing an epochal set of decisions that will determine the infrastructure of free expression and the policies and regulations that govern that for the rest of my adult life we will determine that within the next five to ten years and and everyone needs to think about you know what you think about that I may think you know maybe I've spent too much time in the u.s. maybe I think that forms of uncomfortable speech is what the American called the shitty price we pay for freedom maybe you think something else but as long as you think it through then I'm happy there's been of course talk about gatekeepers also and it's kind of a hard to define term because instinctively a lot of us we talk about gatekeepers we talk about platforms and their sheer size that II know it takes on you know monopoly form unprecedented actually in human history probably has just how it extensively we engage with those new monopolies but then at the other end talk about early gatekeepers that have been much more strict and allowing us what to see and not to see one of those early gatekeepers was the Catholic Church in Europe for one thing and if you look at it in a really broad historical perspective big gatekeepers have the tendency to break down at one point because people are fed up and people not going to do this until another gatekeeper comes up and that might be a Reformed Church you know but I'm just as a speculation into the future are you think do you think that platforms are going to loose that power in the near future any time are people going to be fed up with them although they use them on a daily basis I mean that's a complex form of engagement and the complex feeling but it's possible to criticize something you love or you engage with on a daily basis do you think that's going to happen are they going to be too big I think there are a couple of different things going on at the same time I think the first thing that's worth noting and again this may be different in Germany I haven't seen any original data on this but in the United States in the UK amongst the sort of chattering classes people like me and and journalists and others there is a talk of so-called tech lash right let's just say that that is probably more of a Twitter phenomenon and than anything that sort of has a broad public basis when you look at the annual tracking of the American consumer satisfaction index you know American users of platforms like Google are happy and they are have been sort of unbroken ly happy ever since the ACS I started tracking their consumer satisfaction with Google they have been unbroken ly happy with YouTube they've been slightly less happy with Facebook and slightly less less happy with Facebook after the two last year is a pretty difficult public discussion but broadly happy and the amount of time that they spent and the number of people who are activities has not really defined so the tech lash I think is a political and a lead phenomenon and very real and potentially quite dramatic in its consequences I don't think we should see it as a broad-base sort of public turning against these companies that that most of us even if we have more and more reservations about them and more and more understanding of at least some of their operations are using quite a lot largely because we sort of broadly feel that they you know do things for us that we would like to do now that said I think there are sort of two other things that are are happening one is that even as it is clear that the most successful incumbent platform companies have some part of the digital economy where they are very very powerful you know Google is by far the most successful search engines Facebook is by far the most socially successful social network Amazon by far the most successful ecommerce provider even if they have individual areas where they were very dominant more broadly there are more and more different parts of our economy in our digital lives that are operated via platforms so even if some individual parts of the platform economy is very dominated by a few companies and incumbents who are hard to dislodge more broadly I think we are seeing a more plural platform economy and more competition not competition in the sense of you know a thousand flowers blooming but you know dozens and I think that's the why the the point about the platform wars' is important like you know if you if you were one of the third parties on india was is looking at one of these companies they look untouchable but if you're one of them you are engaged as I said at the outset in the fiercest corporate battle in human history right so they don't feel secure even if they have some bastions that are quite secure they don't feel secure at all so I think there is a lot of competition and then the third thing I think that's worth saying is that it's very clear that whatever the wider public discourse or public opinion is on this that there is a very real political movement right now to intervene in this space and I'll be absolutely shocked if we don't see pretty large-scale intervention in this space in the near to medium-term future I think we're gonna see some version of reform of the framework of competition enforcement and and perhaps regulation at the very least I think the weather weather that will lead to more decisive correction I think is a separate question and not one I'm personally convinced is necessarily particularly useful or constructive but of course we should also remember and this is again back to the point about what role each of you think that the state and politicians should play in this that there is one question about what kind of political invention you would like to see in this space and the other one is which one you are likely to see right and I think it's just worth remembering you know just when you think of political intervention just think of politicians right they are the ones are gonna make the rules so the rules are not gonna be any better or any worse than the politicians and and you know you're more blessed here I think then for example I would not personally be particularly comfortable with the thought of the kuren inhabitant of a certain White House being the ones with draw draft legislation of what should govern free expression for the you next 10 to 20 years before we open this up real quick maybe a note on your own research you've done some wonderful work you know case studies more I would call it probably qualitative of work but it's very hard to do quantitative work in your feet in your field and that's partly due to the reason that those corporations don't talk and that I don't give out their data and so forth Facebook is a lot worse than Google how I take it at least on my side in a journalistic cited Facebook doesn't talk to media at all Google only if it's really you know if things are boiling over otherwise they really don't what's your history with those platforms how do you gather your data to your field of work with those corporations which is do not have a culture or history of working with other actors at an open basis it's it's interesting you you mentioned that my first book kindly when you introduced me which was essentially piece of ethnographic research into political campaigns in United States where I spent 10 months working alongside the volunteers and the professional campaign staff and I think in many ways actually that prepared me quite well for doing this kind of work which as said I've done with a colleague Sarah Kanter who's done some of the interviews and been instrumental in the project so I should recognize her and her work as well in this space but fundamentally I suppose that I think the the key here really is to make sure that everyone you talk to are convinced that your interest is to understand what's going on and that you're not gonna abuse anything they say to try to create a headline or to put them in a worse light than they might recognize as a fair representation of what they are doing on those terms I've find that that people are relatively willing to talk and I've found it's quite constructive actually to to talk to them now I think the thing that's worth just remembering and I don't say this is defense of any of them there are big companies they can take care of themselves as they've shown time and again and they're making a lot of money so they're not really you know what is it Casey Newton I know John Herman from the New York Times called called 2019 the best worst year ever for Silicon Valley right I mean they're doing pretty well but what I would say is that um we are in a situation now where the the sense inside the large platform companies is I think basically identical to the sense inside a high-stakes political campaign which is that every journalist is out to get you and anything you say will be used against you and there is they think that there is no journalistic consideration of whether it's actually true whether it's actually fair you know whether taken out of context alike I don't think they're always right but I can see where they get that from I think there is a lot of sort of you know coverage right now that is a bit sensationalist frankly in this space with many journalism for year right I mean every company in the world could have that concern it's true I I think and I again I said I I don't think it's particularly unusual I think it's just that these companies were just as naive as we were about them I think for a long time they were pretty naive about you know the rest of us - right because they've been treated quite nicely by publishers by politicians and by members of the public and in some sense we were all growing up and I think frankly I think that's really really quite healthy for all of us all so of course I should say because I think as we grow up all of us the platform's as well I think we'll also be better equipped to make meaningful distinctions just as different publishers are different or different politicians are different different platforms are different they do their work in different ways and if people are interested in learning more about that I can't recommend enough the work of Rebecca MacKinnon and the ranking digital rights team that try to really assess each of the platforms on their transparency on their human rights record on their privacy policies in life so you as a user and a citizen can really understand okay well you know they may all be based in Silicon Valley and come out of California but they're kind of different right and they're not all the same so I think we should be growing up as well Thank You Russ most I think it's time to take questions from the floor maybe a couple first and then we'll switch to Twitter so lady in the second row and the new lady in the first draw that gentleman in a second that's what I saw so far so let's take those three for the beginning please thank you so much for your lecture um so you've really touched on regulatory issues already and you also mentioned the ability so I'm wondering what do you think that liability rules need to be updated and what do you think recently updated copyright directive has done anything positive for this sort of picture you've drawn for this battle the epochal battle um value of content thank you do you want to take a few or sort of taken individual open thanks just to make sure we get lots of times for different questions I'll try to be much briefer than I am unfortunately have a weakness which is rambling on on liability I think the most important thing is to ensure more effective oversight through a combination of multi-stakeholder oversight greater accountability and greater access to data for independent third party so that no one gets to mark their own homework I think that's a more important first step than the question of liability it seems to me that if we knew more about what was going on we would be better able to access bad performance and good performance and the things in between and be better able to make informed decisions about whether the legal framework for expression and behavior we think is a much more sensitive area needs to be adjusted so I think we need to understand better first now what I always say whenever the platform companies have the you know the good manners to you know at least momentarily look like they might be marginally interested in what I have to say is that I think that if they don't help us understand better what they are doing we have moved from a world in which many of us thought they were better than they probably were to a world in which many of us may think their problem may be worse than they probably are and if that is the world we live in then they will be the chrony an intervention it will hurt them so I think it's in their self-interest to be more transparent than they are now and if they aren't it may be because they have something to hide and then we know we'll find other ways of dressing that on the question of copyright you know publishers have very strong opinions about this I think there are a number of concerns with the copyright directive I'm not very keen on the idea of screening content as it's uploaded for potential copyright violations in ways I think we'll probably restrict expression for us as individuals so I have reservations about that and I don't think that can be technically solved in a way that doesn't restrict speech by on the side of caution to have reservations about that from a business point of view I understand publishers are fighting their corner I respect that I think people should fight their corner when they're doing things that are important I'm not personally convinced that the fundamental business challenge facing publishers is copyright it seems to me the fundamental business challenge facing publishers is that we have moved from a world in which media audiences had low choice and as a consequence publisher had high market power over advertisers to a world in which media users have high choice and as a consequence publishers of low market power over advertisers and it's just basic economics that they will make less money than in the past but that's a hell of a lot easier for me to say as an outsider than it is to say if you have quarterly profit goals to your shareholders or if you own a company that used to be worth X and it's now worth Y I mean McClatchy in the united states is worth 99% less than when they bought knight-ridder I mean it's tough for these companies so I respect their fighting their corner but I'm not convinced that the copyright reform in itself will do anything material for their commercial prospects June 8 please you pointed out the link between empowerment and dependency of publishers Vasavi platforms and you also made the point that government should only get involved in terms of regulating these markets in those countries where fundamental rights are effectively protected but I wonder if governments do indeed get more involved and regulate these markets whether we would not see the same kind of link emerging between empowerment and dependency think of the BBC in the UK for example which is much more dependent on the government and the chosen it's reporting I think you strike strike it on the head I mean I think that's the concern I mean and I you know I'm very firmly of the view that in democratic societies the public benefits from a bi variety of different media arrangements but I would as much as I admire the BBC nothing is perfect but it's real shortcomings I personally admire the BBC and I think it's unbalanced my personal view is that it's probably unbalanced a good thing that the BBC exists but you know what I want to live in a world where there is only the BBC no I wouldn't I mean I think it's good that there is a diversity of different voices and I would be you know quiet worried about a world in which then the the majority the platform economy was directly subservient to the state that doesn't mean that there isn't a role as some have suggested for some form of public service platform though I think we need to be very clear-eyed about what that would mean for your tax bill right because to compete with these very large and very successful and very rich companies is not cheap you know 10 cent in China has just committed 2 billion u.s. dollars to compete with tik-tok right as an upstart a relative small ups our platform company so there is to be a public service platform funded by all of us to compete with the Americans it's not going to be cheap and it might be the right thing to do but you know we're not gonna get it for cheap and it's good evening and you know I never thought that in my life would defend or look positively back to the years of where Axel Springer or Murdoch were dominating the the media landscape in our countries but one has to say he they didn't put loudspeakers microphones in our living rooms they didn't know when we would switch off and on the lights in our apartments they wouldn't create payment systems control access to social or credit ratings dominate ecommerce I think that the platform's we are talking about it's not just about media it is just so overwhelming in its its power and its outreach into various areas of the economic switch which makes it really very difficult to to accept this as a status quo it's it's not just that they have replaced publishing in one way the other I think it goes far beyond Ted I mean it's clear that that the largest these companies are growing you know very rapidly in many different lines of business and I think this is one of the reasons why it's important that we think about what is a competitive economy looked like a competitive digital economy looked like where you don't punish success and you don't think that companies are bad simply because they are big without evidence but where if the burden of evidence can be lifted to document abuse of dominant market position then that has to have consequences and ideally consequences quickly not consequences 10 years later where it's too too late to really make much of a difference that said I mean I think and I'm not saying this is what you're suggesting but I think it's worth sometimes recognizing that I think sometimes when we maybe lose size size of how large how small these entities are so for example there there are I here and again I'm not imputing this viewer to you but I hear people say all the time oh you know these are the largest most powerful entities ever to see this plan on the one on I'm I'm thinking well you know and they have more resource than anybody else and whatnot I mean I hear this in Brussels all the time for example well one thing I like to think of just remind people off when the Commission and people officials from the Commission say these things is that the budget of the European Commission is much larger than the annual revenues of Facebook I mean and the entity in the budget of most European states is far larger than the annual revenues of any of these companies so these are not the first logical operations of power we seen in our societies I think the question is can that power be exercised in a way that is accountable that is intelligible that is legitimate and that allows for contestation that that for me as a citizen are the key concerns and I don't think I have the answers but I think we need to develop them and I would like to think that it would be better if we develop them on the base of some kind of evidence rather than the sort of assertions and opinions that tend to dominate a lot of the elite discussion that I that I see at least from policy makers and and some journalists not all but some probably would be hard to say that Axel Springer and Rupert Murdoch did not peep into any bedrooms you know during their reign when they were in power I mean maybe not in all of our bedrooms but in very many so let's look at you know if anything's happening on Twitter before I have another gentleman who raised his hand but Jana is there anything on Twitter worth noting maybe we'll take just a bunch of questions now and then see what happens from Twitter there's one question okay by Christian home box out outs go out to you he has a question about your opinion on sponsored post on news sites what do you think about them look the business of news is very difficult and very challenging and I think it's really legitimate that publishers think about any source of revenue that can support independent professional journalism provided that doesn't undercut the purpose of that independent professional journalism and I think sponsored content can do that if it's done well if it's clearly marked as separate from editorial if it's clearly presented in a way where the reader can understand this is not the same as the news coverage or independent commentary and opinion in this newspaper then I think it's one of the sources of revenues that publishers can rely on I have to say I see a lot of publishers do this in ways that strike me as quite short-sighted way I think they risk their credibility which I think long-term is their most important asset their brand and their credibility and I understand why they're doing that because fundamentally of course this is what the sponsors probably want is to blur the line between editorial and sponsored content so you know I see some publishers do it well and I respect that because I like publishers to make money so that they can invest in journalism I don't really care about their shareholders and whatnot but journalism I care about but I think there are a number of publishers who risk their their relationship with the audience because I think they're doing in ways that are a bit potentially misleading things there's a gentleman in in the back third to last row yeah please thanks a lot my question goes more in the direction of business so we covered a little bit the music domain let's make an example of Spotify and how how would you rate business opportunities amongst that to to centralize for example subscriptions were Spotify makes actually 90% of the revenue of fire subscriptions and give a substantial amount of that to and distributing amongst the music industry how would you rate that as a business opportunity for example for publishers there are a lot of smart people who are trying to create some rough you know counterpart to Spotify or Netflix for for news right now the other type of sort of new platform if I can use that term that that a lot of people are experimenting with the various forms of micro payment systems again shared across different publishers so you'd have a single interface through which you could pay a small and money for individual articles from lots of different subscribe publishers without having to subscribe to all of them individually it seems to me I wish these people well I really do as said I really you know fundamentally want to see commercial innovation to power editorial ambition in the publishing industry I firmly believe in the importance of for-profit independent professional journalism that said I think the the question I have in my mind is whether the analogy to Spotify or Netflix is a good one and what I mean by that is that there it seems to me that there are two things that are very very different between music and videos on the one side and premium video on the one side and then news on the other side one is that the the unit we engage with is Mart is more substantial much more substantial in the form of television drama or let alone movies but even with songs that's one thing right i mean the the engaged time to use industry jargon that that I have with say a song from from the Hamilton musical is longer than almost any news article I will read in the course of a day and and that is a key driver of the value of a platform that aggregates that content from lots of different providers the other thing is the shelf life of it again you know I will listen to that song from Hamilton you know dozens of times whereas by its very nature a lot of news content has almost no shelf life it's it's it has almost no value for the user a day or two after it's been published so it I wonder whether models that have developed for large units of evergreen content will work for tons of very small units with very short shelf life we have somebody in the back put the microphone already please can you hear me thank you this is a very interesting great presentation my question is that given that many stakeholders as you mentioned from elected officials to publishers advertisers and even us as consumers of Conte I have a vested if not problematic kind of interest in maintaining the power of platforms who are you looking to as kind of maybe exciting either leaders initiatives or organizations that are really pushing for reforms well I mean let me first let me be sort of frank with you and this format sort of invites almost you know indecent sharing in the intimacy of the theater with a few of one's best friends I hope I have conveyed that I think the current situation is is complex and that it has some very real problems associated with it I would also say that my personal view is that I wouldn't trade the media environment we have today for the one I grew up with in the 90s warts and all I don't want to go back to the past even though I think the press is quite complicated and fraught with some possible dangers I can see why newspaper owners would want to go back to the past but but I don't I can even see a journalist I mean that that was quite privileged but I said that was not my job my job was to no way through the snow and deliver the paper or try to sell it over the phone to people really didn't want to buy it oh no it's only owners who want to go so I don't think the nine seas were better in some emerging sense that said I think there is room for improvement so what would I like to see I mean I want to be realistic about you know what we can expect from our politicians I don't think that policymaking in this area will be any more sort of ideal and inform than picture to picture-perfect and policymaking in any other area really of great stakes because there are great stakes here that said I think we are at a moment now where there is an opportunity to do something in this space and I guess I'm cautiously optimistic that it might be possible for the new European Commission and for member state governments just think about some interventions in this space that would make this information environment that I think is better than the 90s even better if you will for all of us so I think there is a space for political intervention if we keep an eye on them and ensure that they don't see it as their job to protect incumbents or to act on the basis of moral panics that often of course are curiously politically expedient for themselves right I mean there is nothing better for a politician than an unsolvable problem that they can bang on about we know quite a few of those so I think there is a space for political action I think more importantly and this is closer as opposed to the heart of what what I deal with on a day-to-day basis given where I work I'm actually quite encouraged by the journey that publishers are all on not not in the sense of the industry being out of the woods commercially I think there is going to be at least another 10 years of commercial decline in the top-line revenue is probably for most for most publishers but I would say that I think there is a new found clarity amongst publishers about their relationship with these companies where more and more publishers that I speak to I think have come to the realization that just as an ecosystem very large creatures and much smaller creatures can coexist so - in media environments very large companies and much smaller companies can co-exist and they can have mutually beneficial even if deeply as symmetrical relations as long as they know what they want and I think this is what has become clear amongst publishers and that I think is quite encouraging similarly of course I would hope that all of us as citizens if we follow this debate you know feel we are making more informed decisions and feel that there is an intrinsic value to living a life that is examined right even if you're doing the same thing you did the day before it's better if you do it while knowing what it means right to think of the Snowden revelations we all know now for a fact that we've been spied on industrial-scale wholesale by our own governments right we all know this now and it's better that we know it even if it didn't change anything we did it has intrinsic value that we know it so in this sense I think a more intelligible society in itself is better and I think we're all the fact that all of you are showing out tonight is in that sense I think encouraging and I hope that all of you will talk to some of your friends not about me that I'm boring but about these issues because it matters for all of us this is all almost a closing statement yeah but I'd like to take one more question I saw from the audience and then wrap it up because there's snacks and there's a bar open it's going to be a little buffet it's hard to tell me now let's take the gentleman at the back at the console yeah yeah but the end will be the sustainability of freelance journalism yes but by taxing platforms okay so here's my response and again you know people have different views in this I think there is a there is a question always in public policy about what is the most efficient way of doing something and what is the most credible way of doing something and I think in the perfect world we look for both things at the same time we may live in a world right now where the most credible way to make a collectively binding public policy decision to take money from someone and give it to journalism where the most credible way to do that is crudely put a Google tax but it's not the most efficient way of doing it I mean economists and and finance ministry officials hate what they call hypothecated taxes they think they're inefficient they think to distort the marketplace they don't think it's a good form of public policy and I think on reflection I think we can all recognize why imagine a world in which we had a funded public transport by taxing private railroad companies and then when trucks arrived we would still need public transport but we had less money for it or where we had funded public schools by attacks on coal power power plants and then we would change to sustainable energy and we were still need schools but we have less money for it so I personally think that the the idea of taxing specifically one set of companies to provide funding for something we as a public good it's not an efficient way to do it I personally think that if we resort to that which is something I'm cautiously a backer off I think there are examples of how this can be done in a good way I think it should the money should come through general taxation and again I think there is an element of learned helplessness from some politicians and policymakers in the space where they sometimes pretend that they can't do these things right now let's give me let me give you an example in the UK the UK under the previous the Teresa May government announced that an instruction of a digital services tax on some of the large platform companies that I think from memory was estimated to we bringing in I think from memory 250 250 million UK pounds additional every year of tax revenue that's a lot of money for you and I from the point of view of the UK Treasury that would take the net UK Treasury tax take from seven hundred and forty billion pounds to seven hundred forty point to five billion pounds right the the problem here is not money the question is whether what we want to spend it on and the problem here I think fundamentally is that for those like you and I who think that there is a possible role for public policy to support the economic sustainability of independent professional journalism in a way that doesn't give politicians or civil servants opportunities meddle with the content for those like you and I who believe that that is a legitimate proposition I think the question essentially is one of politics we've just had an election in the UK I have to say if I was a politician as much as I care about journalism personally if I was a politician I'm not sure I would want to go knock on doors and say people my campaign slogan my campaign slogan is fewer nurses and more journalists or higher taxes and more journalists right I think fundamentally that's the question right and and in that sense there is a much broader issue here that is perhaps interlinked with the rise of platforms but not directly reducible to it which is the public connection between journalism and much of the public is frankly fraying right people don't trust journalism many people at least people don't find journalism very valuable we asked in our big survey this year whether people felt that news help them understand the world 51% said yes like like almost half the public doesn't feel that news help them understand the world that's astonishing to me and when we look at the amount of time that people spend the news is about three percent of their digital media use like the public connection that powers journalism is fraying and if that puppet connection isn't there the profession will matter less the business will be harder they will have less leverage with platforms and it'll be harder to make the case for public support so that is a concern that goes well beyond platforms but for that you will have to invite me back to balloon another time as a very last note Rasmus now our second speaker in this series was Christopher burger then Munich I think is now at the Weizenbaum Institute here in Berlin a colleague of your so to speak and you mentioned it too in your writings you mentioned it partly tonight that there is a difference between what are new you know called news corporations in public broadcast for example in terms of political clout in terms of trusts which they enjoy from their audiences as well as I'm informed the BBC and you know programs like - London audio - and funky and Germany actually enjoy more trust than they had like 10 or 20 years ago so this is actually a graph going up I'm not sure if that is exactly the case with the BBC but it is the case in Germany that much I know which surprised me - in a way you know that everybody is talking about the crisis of trust of the whole journalism journalism but invest in Europe with public broadcasting which is totally different from the US and it's totally different from Eastern European market as well let's not speak about the Russian market it's sort of a you know very special situation they chose in one of your graphs also every said that 80% of the traffic goes to the BBC directly is this just a mere coincidence or is it actually causally linked somehow that trust and direct traffic to the site have something to do with each other and is that such a special European situation as I you know would like to imagine tune it in in those countries which we really need to remember a few in northwestern Europe where there are what you can describe as genuinely independent public service media they are almost always both the most widely used and the most widely trusted not just most trusted but most widely trusted most trusted by different groups in society different ages different income levels different levels of education different political point of view even on the right as well as on the left and in the center in most countries so that model I think has something going for it and also of course in the countries where they have not been politically constrained from engaging with the platform's they are often actually quite popular on YouTube and Facebook and on Twitter and elsewhere it seems to me that the challenge that's facing public service media in Europe leaving aside the ones where the challenge is very simple its politicians who want to reduce public service media to state broadcasters which is a much more primal threat than anything else we talked about tonight and one that afflicts about one in five of our European Union fellow citizens we should just remember about 90 million people in the European Union live in countries with significant problems of press freedom 90 million it the the challenge is essentially that public service media are largely still public service broadcasters which means that the audience they reach is old very old and aging and the question I think over time is if you have a funding model like in the UK that is promised on everybody paying 150 pounds a year for something if you're 25 and don't have kids so you don't appreciate the advertising free environment that the BBC offers to children and you have only the most fleeting contact with BBC through a news app you might quite reasonably ask why the hell should I pay 150 pounds a year for this that eventually is a subsidy scheme that takes money from everybody gives it to old people who watch TV that's a regressive form of Taxation and I think the problem is probably even more pronounced in Germany to be perfectly honest where our data at least suggests that with a few exceptions a lot of the public service broadcasters are really struggling to reach beyond their corporate caste orience so I say that as someone who believes in the purpose and the potential of public service media also in the 21st century but the real challenge there seems to me is not if you will so much trust and reach which they have it is whether they can define their purpose and deliver on it for a younger audience who will never let's be real about this who will never accept that that that their media decisions should be made by you know old white guys sitting in a broadcast centre somewhere far away deciding what they should watch and when I mean it's it's impossible to imagine for me that people who have grown up with with on-demand personalised portable high quality content will suddenly think you know what I think that I should find a man in his early 60s you know in Bonn who can probably better tell me what I should watch then I can do it myself it's inconceivable to me and if public service media can't find out their their way in this world it's game over so in that sense let me just say I think there are some who are who are trying to look at this kiken if you just took over in what is it called in Stuttgart the s s WR is that what it's called a sphere I think he's he's very seriously thinking about this and he was I think quite bravely went out and said very early on I'm gonna cut broadcasts investment to invest in digital that it seems to me is something that they will have to do otherwise they face a bigger threat than declining trust irrelevance or maybe we have to differentiate a radio here from TV I mean TV is a lot worse than that not a lot of old white guys that are radio stations I work for to tell you the truth that's changing at least in Berlin I hope it isn't undergo continue very last questions you listen to the radio are you an old guy or a young I haven't I can't apart from like World Cup football I can't remember the last time I watched something that was programmed or listen to something that was programmed I mean all all my media use is digital almost all of it is on-demand I will very occasionally read something and print over the weekend just not to stare at a screen but other than that um you know I may be middle-aged but I cannot imagine going back to to a schedule it just it's unimaginable to me and I and I really cannot imagine you know a 25 year old thinking that you know we should kill some trees in Finland you know pulp them sale them to Germany like print things on them like drive them with trucks you know to my house and give me things that happen in the world 24 hours ago I cannot imagine or or the broadcast equivalent I say I'm saying this I mean I I'm glad that there are some people find this so much humorous but but I cannot stress enough how often I'm asked by it by otherwise you know so poor seemingly so poor and sensible people well you know don't you think when they grow up they'll be gonna read the paper huh yeah they're gonna read the paper or they're gonna watch TV or they gonna listen to radio and I just have to say no I don't think they will actually do be perfectly honest and it's not just something I think this is like their copias their mountains of evidence to suggest that they won't so I think we we may not be you know the generalized we if being sort of published in journals we end up like this but if we don't face it like we don't have situational awareness and this is back to the point I've tried to make throughout the evening just the same way that I want you to have situational awareness so you can make better decisions not the decisions I might have made in the ERR situation but the decisions you want to make but more inform the same way I cannot live with the sort of denial the media change denial that exists in some political circles and some media circles I think we should be realists and confront the world we're in and also just accept that we have big challenges here but frankly I mean so did the generation before us they had big challenge and the one before us too and if they could rise to that challenge I'm sure we can too so thank you for this very real performance Rasmus clean and his Kleiss and neither on paper and near on the screen thank you for being with us Erasmus class medicine thank you [Applause]