94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or good
Learn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish.
Find out more
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1556826
This article is part of the Research TopicUnderstanding Media Policy in the 21st Century: Affirmation, Challenge, Re-ConstitutionView all 4 articles
Digital Platforms and News Publishers: Uneasy Relationship
Provisionally accepted- City St George's, University of London, London, United Kingdom
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
People across the globe increasingly rely on digital platforms to communicate, entertain and access information. Whereas many of these activities were conducted through legacy news media, entities such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram currently dominate in most national contexts. The business models of digital platforms, their global nature and the pace that digital technologies and services evolve challenge existing regulatory frameworks concerning consumer protection, transparency, and power imbalances, especially in ensuring that substantial market power does not reduce competition in media and advertising services markets.This article deals with regulating relations between digital platforms and news publishers. It discusses recent reforms which respond to the unequal bargaining power between digital platforms and news media publishers. It questions whether tech giants should pay news media for news content that they carry and whether there are guarantees that funds received by news publishers will be reinvested into public interest journalism. By doing so, it examines the competitive impacts and implications of their existing commercial relationships, in particular the role of online advertising in the dissemination and monetisation of news content and the long term impact on the sustainability of the news media sector.It is clear that news media providers and digital platforms are both benefiting from the distribution of news content. However, the digital platforms need to improve the transparency of their operations for news media providers as they have a significant impact on the capacity of news media organisations to build and maintain an audience and derive resources from the media content they produce. Overall, the article asks whether the discourse surrounding digital platform regulation generally, and measures by nation-states to rebalance market relations to the benefit of news publishers, can safeguard public interest journalism, promote reliable information, and promote democracy.
Keywords: Digital platforms, News publishers, Big Tech, policy, regulation
Received: 07 Jan 2025; Accepted: 15 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Iosifidis. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Petros Iosifidis, City St George's, University of London, London, United Kingdom
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.