The second speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Raul Ferrer-Conill; he begins with pointing to the long-standing discussion of whether digital and social media platforms are publishers or merely carriage services – or more recently, perhaps, tech and infrastructure companies. Such infrastructure is centrally important, of course, as the material basis for mediated communication.
This project began by mapping ownership of such infrastructure in Norway: while unusually, only one sub-sea Internet cable is privately owned, content delivery networks and data centres are overwhelmingly privately owned. This private ownership of content delivery networks (an example is a service like Akamai) demonstrates the news industry’s erosion of institutional power: it has largely relinquished its control over content distribution. This undermines the universality of distribution even for previously universal content like broadcast television.
The team has explored the value chains of content distribution with participants from the major broadcasters in Norway, major telecom operators, the Association of Media businesses, and the Norwegian Communications Authority. For broadcast, it follows a linear path from satellite and content producers through TV channels to distribution, where multiple paths via content delivery networks, cable, and digital terrestrial transmission are now available; this is also becoming increasingly modular due to the role of data centres providing storage services for content – these provide data capacity, scalability, data security, and know-how that may note be available in-house.
Much of this is driven by expectations of service quality: these services are used in order to ensure the quality of content distribution and streaming, where they supplement or supplant in-house know-how. Small, national operations are unlikely to build the internal knowledge required to complete with large global players like Google, Netflix, or TikTok. This also means that these organisations often don’t fully understand these solutions, but this dependence on third parties is rarely seen as a problem – content delivery networks are seen as a convenient outsourced service that does not need to be dealt with in-house. But this shift can still be seen as a loss of strategic control and power, and the reliance on third parties, often from outside of the country, seems like a blind spot.
