This article identifies the current global ‘techlash’ towards the major digital and social media platforms as providing the context for a renewed debate about whether these digital platform companies are effectively media companies (publishers and broadcasters of media content), and implications this has for twenty-first-century media policy. It identifies content moderation as a critical site around which such debates are being played out, and considers the challenges arising as national and regionally based regulatory options are considered for digital platforms that are ‘born global’. It considers the shifting balance between the ‘social contract’ of public interest obligations and democratic rights of free speech and freedom of expression.
Location, locality, and localism have long been important characteristics of news, but their functions have been given a dramatic twist with the advent of locative, mobile media. The capabilities of mobile media devices to determine, sense, incorporate, and conjure with the relative locations of reporting and audiences have emerged as key to alternative, small-and large-scale networked news-gathering and dissemination ventures. This paper explores the kinds of places and spaces these mobile worlds of news-making and consumption entail-and how news is being located in and through such new mobilities.
In this paper, we undertake a stakeholder analysis of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Digital Platforms Inquiry to understand the nature and influence of different forms of public input. Our findings show that nation-state regulation of digital platforms is now very much on the policy agenda worldwide, with a focus upon the competition policy dimensions of platform regulation. The second key finding is that the regulatory activism of the ACCC have ensured that the Inquiry and its findings have had maximum public impact. Finally, we argue that the key dynamic shaping the Inquiry was the competing demands of the traditional news media publishers and digital platforms, and that civil society input was relatively limited and secondary to the final recommendations.
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