00:00Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
00:30Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
01:00Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
01:29So if you look at the worldwide market capitalization at the moment from last year, the U.S. had 86% share of the entire world share, Europe only 2%, and you can imagine the rest goes to China, so there's also little help.
01:50There's one important thing that we need to note that this applies to media, and I will also come back to this.
02:00It applies to the access to digital markets if you think about Amazon and Amazon Marketplace.
02:07And of course, cloud services, IT infrastructures, and for the future, it's generative AI.
02:14So, the problem here is that all these are something that we call public goods.
02:22Public goods are typically something that you cannot live without.
02:24You cannot live without access to information.
02:27You cannot live without access, let's say, to the health system.
02:30So, they monopolize all these media markets and digital markets.
02:37And here you see basically the overview, and you see the little gray bubbles on the top right, which are the European companies, which are hardly recognizable.
02:47And by the way, I can complement this with an own empirical study that we have performed at the University of Cologne.
02:55It's published in this atlas of the digital world, where we did the worldwide first full measurement of the entire media usage of the country.
03:04This was done for Germany.
03:05And I think this slide even also became somehow famous in the Netherlands, because it was shared a lot, where you could see that the entire traffic in the entire digital world basically is divided between these monopolies that you can see here.
03:23First, let's say, a couple of offers that you have on the very left.
03:27And the entire rest of the Internet is a kind of void of traffic.
03:32So, there's a lot of offers, but these offers do not get any traffic, because all the traffic is inside the monopoly.
03:41And I'm a media scientist, so I'm working on digital monopolies since 15 years.
03:45And, of course, it's a huge issue, because we lose media freedom fundamentally in a situation where monopolists control the public sphere.
03:55So, you could say that at this point, this was only a matter of media freedom.
04:01And I wrote a book already early.
04:04This was published in 2003.
04:08It was also translated in English.
04:10And the title was, let's say, very, very strong on this matter.
04:14It said, Big Tech Must Go, Digital Giants Destroy Democracy and Economy.
04:20And at the time, I still said, we will stop them.
04:23And many people in 2023 said, oh, it's completely exaggerated.
04:29And I don't need to tell you what has happened in the last years.
04:33It's like basically all that was predicted in this book, that tech power would become political.
04:37So, you know that tech joined the Trump election, that Trump won the election.
04:45You know that, for instance, in Germany, Elon Musk helped in the election for the right-wing populist party, AFD.
04:54So, you have seen this picture, you have heard the speech of J.D. Vance, and so on and so on.
05:01So, now all of this has become reality.
05:04So, what do we see here?
05:05We see a kind of coalition happening.
05:08So, we see a coalition on the one hand between the tech platforms.
05:13On the left, you can see it here.
05:15They monopolize opinion power, and they destroy established media and journalism.
05:22And then you see on the other side, on the right side, you see the populists.
05:27And they typically make use of the polarizing algorithms and destroy what they call the established parties.
05:36So, you can also see that this is killing the kind of balanced middle that we have.
05:41And, of course, that's a huge problem, because this is not only a matter just of media freedom,
05:49but a lot of these parties are anti-democratic, and these tech companies make use of this.
05:57So, I call this a media war in the new book.
06:01It's a hostile coalition against Western democracies that is leading to the destruction of balanced information,
06:08de-balanced information sphere, and, let's say, moderate political parties, which we see everywhere in Europe happening.
06:14And you can also say that then it's not only anymore a matter of media freedom or digital regulation.
06:22It's also a matter of national security and our defense of democracy.
06:26So, to also show you the power that these companies have,
06:34what you see here is a scientific investigation where you see the, let's say, share of voice, you can say,
06:43the attention of one person, which is Elon Musk,
06:46a couple of weeks before the U.S. election,
06:51in comparison to the full share of voice or full attention that all the members of the entire U.S. Congress gained.
07:00So, you see all the politicians here on the right.
07:02And you can see that one person has 16 times the power versus the entire Congress,
07:11and that's the situation that we're in.
07:14And, by the way, if you look at these kind of actors in this media war,
07:20you can't even say that, you know, this is, you know, the vocabulary is too tough in my book
07:27because this is the vocabulary that they use.
07:30They use a vocabulary of warfare.
07:33So, information war, Peter Zilf talks about the apocalypse that is coming and now cleaning the world.
07:41The U.S. State Department calls these right-wing parties in Europe civilizational allies.
07:48Elon Musk has written already early last year,
07:52civil war is inevitable, and so on, and so on.
07:56And so, this is something that they see as a kind of civilizational war,
08:02and we should take it very serious.
08:05And that's basically why the book is called like that,
08:10Media War, Dark Tech, and Populists Are Seizing Power,
08:13because that's what we can see in the U.S. right now,
08:16and that's what is also happening in Europe,
08:19and it's moving at a steady pace,
08:21and these guys are winning this war at the moment.
08:24So, of course, let's also think about our solutions,
08:29because one thing is very sad.
08:31We could solve this if we wanted to,
08:35because we have created this dependency by ourselves,
08:38so we only need to decrease the dependencies and ramp up the alternatives.
08:44And I've shown in my books how we can do this.
08:49Basically, all these measures are there to kind of open these markets,
08:54which are now monopolized.
08:56So we would, for instance, force the platforms to open themselves up for outlinks,
09:01so boom, you would have the possibility of digital traffic also to happen outside of the platform monopolies.
09:08Second, open standards.
09:11If we have open standards, you know, the challenger platforms would be much better able to compete.
09:19Then three and four go together.
09:22So basically, the idea is that we separate the infrastructure and the content.
09:27Yeah, so you would have, for instance, YouTube infrastructure platform services and YouTube content services.
09:34And if we would see monopolistic conditions, which we have in the free video market,
09:42then we would open these infrastructures to third-party suppliers.
09:47And finally, the last measure would be, at the moment, we still allow these platforms to monetize criminal content.
09:56And that's something that we could stop immediately.
09:59We could say, once you monetize specific content, you are also responsible.
10:04And you can see that these measures are not, let's say, crazy.
10:08We could easily put them into a framework,
10:14and then we could ramp up EU alternatives and boost existing alternatives.
10:21So now, whenever I talk about this, people are like, oh my God, yeah, but if we do this,
10:26you know, the Trump administration will raise tariffs and so on and so on.
10:30So I always describe this with a metaphor of this bird that's been sitting in the cage for 20 years.
10:38And despite the fact that the door is wide open, it doesn't leave the cage.
10:43Because if we think about it, we could do this if we wanted to.
10:48Because first of all, if we all realize that all fields in our society are having the same problems because of the monopolies.
10:56It doesn't matter whether you are public broadcasting or if you are private broadcasting or you're publishers, press.
11:03If you are a brand company, if you are a startup, if you are a medium-sized company,
11:08you always have the choice.
11:10Basically, you work either for free for the monopolies or you go down into the big graveyard where there's no traffic.
11:18So, you know, just imagine if we realize that we are basically fooled by the same problem in all fields of our society.
11:28Then we could work to get stuck and then it would be much easier.
11:32Second, the Trump and tech coalition have managed to basically fight against, like, all of these parties which are not united.
11:42And if you think about it, we have the same problems everywhere.
11:46In all the national states of Europe, in Canada, in Great Britain, Australia, Switzerland.
11:51But it would be so easy to join forces and fight against this.
11:57Then the big mystery is that the media themselves are not fighting back.
12:04So what would happen if we created a huge debate about this and fought for the free media as the free media?
12:12And then finally, it should be obvious that all democratic parties have a big interest to save democracy and to save free media.
12:22So we shouldn't work in these, like, bubbles, but we should all join forces.
12:27And if we did that, if we just realized that, no, it would be very easy and the bird could leave the cage.
12:35But if we keep on sitting in there and we think we are, like, mentally blocked, then we're not going to make it.
12:41So these guys are winning the game.
12:45They are moving forward every week and every month.
12:50And if we continue to not do anything, then I fear that the subtitle of my book will become reality.
12:58Dark tech and populist are seizing power.
13:01And I hope that we will still wake up before it's too late.
13:07That's the reason why I wrote this book.
13:09And by the way, this is the world premiere because it's actually the English translation is coming out the day after tomorrow.
13:16It's already out in Germany since about six weeks.
13:20It's a huge success.
13:21So I just received this a couple of days ago.
13:24You are the first people in the world that I've talked about the English edition.
13:27And I hope you enjoyed the talk.
13:31Thank you very much for your attention.
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