The following is an excerpt from the ICC’s interview with Dwayne Winseck. Read the full version here.

Could you bring us up to speed with the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project?

I’ve been working on the CMCR Project for a decade. It emerged from the 30 country International Media Concentration Project led by Eli Noam at Columbia University. Culminating in the 2016 book he edited, entitled ‘Who owns the world’s media?’. This year, we launched a new and expanded venture, the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project. Funded with $2.5 million from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Roughly 40 scholars studying the communications, internet and media industries in 40 countries.

The expanded emphasis foregrounds the rise of new actors like the digital platforms (GAFAM), has a dozen external partners drawn from research centres. UNESCO, Stats Canada, ISOC and the IIC, amongst others. Our website will be up soon, and we intend to provide a wide-ranging resource for policymakers and anyone interested in media market data. (Meanwhile, reports from the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project can be read at www.cmcrp.org, with tenth anniversary editions available in the next few weeks)

In the current drive to place ‘Large Platforms’ in a regulatory regime, the platforms themselves argue that they’re neither telecoms nor media companies and shouldn’t be subject to ‘legacy-style’ regulations. Do you have sympathy with this?

They’re not media companies in the traditional sense, but they are similar to telecoms companies in terms of their scale, scope and gatekeeping power. The fact that digital platforms are different from media and telecoms companies shouldn’t stop us from drawing on regulatory experiences in communications and antitrust. And selectively applying what we know from these areas. That said, I wish we would stop hyper-ventilating over platforms. There is a tendency to place all of the world’s woes at their doorstep. It risks giving a free pass to equally significant sources of power in other areas of communications and media.

Is the approach to regulation on the right path?

The good news is that regulators across the globe are beginning to hold hands, and learn from each other. There is a recognition, as we’ve finally seen with the ruling in the Google shopping case (in which the European Court found in favour of the European Commission’s fine) that trying to regulate behaviour with headline-grabbing fines doesn’t work. ‘Policy theatre’ is sometimes a necessary part of achieving policy change. The ‘big box’ issues, like online harms, attract a great deal of attention.

But you also have to be prepared to do the boring work of rational policymaking. The focus needs to move from regulating behaviour to regulating the operations and structure of the ‘very large platforms’. For example in Google’s case there has to be a separation of search from advertising. Facebook should be restricted in the sharing of data between its different social media entities, as it has been by the Bundeskartellamt in Germany since 2018. GDPR is also an important part of demonstrating that the unregulated market experiment is over.

This is an excerpt from the ICC’s interview. Read the full version here.