The Corner Newsletter: Our Next Revolution Conference on Capitol Hill & Europe’s New Rules to Support Publishers in AI Era (June 16, 2026)
Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we take a look at two new rules from Italy and the U.K. to help news publishers negotiate fair compensation for their content with AI corporations. We also preview our June 24 conference on combating oligarchy, which will feature keynotes from Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, and Chris Van Hollen.
Open Markets to Host “The Next American Revolution: Breaking Oligarchy and Making a New Democracy,” June 24 on Capitol Hill.
Join us June 24 in Washington, D.C. for a wide-ranging discussion to shape the next phase of the fight against concentrated private power and to rebuild American liberty. “The Next American Revolution: Breaking Oligarchy and Making a New Democracy” will bring together policymakers, journalists, and technology and policy experts, for a day-long event to present a broad and inspiring vision for a true renewal of our nation. We will focus on the ideas, strategies, and policy solutions needed to rebuild a political economy that will support the full freedom of every American. Keynotes will include Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, and Chris Van Hollen, and panelists will include representatives Becca Balint and Chris Deluzio as well as Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn, former Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, and former U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. The conference will also feature journalists Julia Angwin, Semafor politics reporter David Weigel, and The New Republic’s Perry Bacon Jr. Please RSVP to attend or livestream the event here.
Italy and U.K. Rules Aim to Rebalance Power Between Publishers and AI Corporations
Dora Wierzbicka
Two recent decisions by European authorities aim to rebalance the relationship between publishers and AI companies who use their journalistic content to train and refine their AI models. Italy issued a ruling based on the EU Copyright Directive that media outlets are entitled to negotiate content attribution and compensation via a regulatory body — a decision upheld by last month’s ruling by the European Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court. Similarly, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has ruled Google must allow publishers to opt out from both AI summaries and efforts to fine tune AI models.
The Italian ruling establishes not only the right for publishers to negotiate with AI companies but also the criteria they can use for determining fair compensation. Factors can include publisher market share, years in operation, and number of employees, as well as the economic benefits to both sides. “This is a more comprehensive view of value than the more myopic traffic-based threshold adopted by most policymakers and the AI content licensing market,” said Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Media and Digital Governance at Open Markets (CMDG@OMI).
The U.K.’s decision helps level the playing field for publishers against Google’s vast technological and market power advantage. The ruling also stipulates the tech giant cannot retaliate by downranking publishers who have opted out of Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI services, and the corporation must give clear source attribution in AI-generated results.
The new rules in Italy and the U.K. come as policymakers belatedly recognize the dire threat that new AI models pose to independent journalism — one of the foundations of democracy. Newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters have struggled for years as Big Tech platforms like Google and Facebook siphoned off the advertising revenue that for more than two centuries provided most of their financial support. Over the last two years, this crisis was made dramatically worse as the introduction of AI summaries removed the need to click through to news sites at all.
The moves in Europe come at a critical moment. Over the last few years, innovative startups like TollBit, ScalePost, and Sphere.ai have worked to build new infrastructure to assist publishers in licensing their content to AI corporations, as a replacement for lost advertising revenues. These projects aim to establish digital marketplaces where publishers and tech companies buy and sell rights to train AI models on news content.
The new digital intermediaries broker group deals or establish digital marketplaces for pay-per-crawl or pay-per-use content access and can provide publishers with analytics on content scraping and usage, which is useful in their negotiations with AI corporations. Cloudflare, whose networking tools are used by about 20% of websites globally, allows site owners to manage AI bot access and is now experimenting with a pay-per-crawl system.
Unfortunately, thus far these solutions have yet to deliver on their promises, and in certain respects may end up reinforcing the dominance of the legacy digital gatekeepers as well as the relative power of a few larger publishers. In recent years, OpenAI, Perplexity, Amazon, and Microsoft have all announced direct deals with multiple publishers. But they offer direct deals only to the publishers with sufficient name recognition and resources to bargain with Big Tech. Less visible local and niche outlets continue to receive little or nothing for their content.
Further, the emerging AI content licensing market has yet to resolve three basic questions. First, how to properly price articles when AI licensing focuses on keywords, page views, and publication dates rather than depth of investigation, editorial independence, accuracy, and originality. Second, how to get AI corporations to comply, given that all the existing solutions rely on voluntary participation.
The third issue is the fundamental conflict of interest created by the fact that licensing marketplaces like ScalePost or TollBit are often backed by the same venture capital that funds the AI startups that benefit from access to cheap or free content. Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl system, meanwhile, depends on that company’s technical infrastructure, which Cloudflare also sells to the dominant AI and tech corporations.
If the market doesn’t reward quality journalism, homogenized, low-cost reporting will come to gradually dominate news, which in turn will worsen the political and social harms arising out of the radical decline in many traditional forms of publishing. Ironically, the crisis may also end up hindering AI innovation. Large language models are trained on journalistic data, and the failure of these corporations to pay for content threatens to degrade their own products.
Ultimately, publishers need to have sufficient independence and power to set their own terms for whether and how AI companies use their intellectual property, and at what price. The new rules in Italy and the U.K. will hopefully set an example on how to rebalance this market for the long term.
Center for Journalism & Liberty Now Known as the Center for Media and Digital Governance
The Open Markets Institute announced that its Center for Journalism and Liberty will now be known as the Center for Media and Digital Governance, reflecting the Center’s expanded focus on how concentrated technology power, digital infrastructure, and artificial intelligence are reshaping journalism, information markets, democratic governance, and public debate. “When the Center was founded, the threat to democratic information systems was platform monopolies capturing journalism’s revenue and audiences and required a deep understanding of media markets and digital advertising,” Dr. Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Media and Digital Governance, said. “Today that threat runs through every layer of the stack — from cloud computing and AI development to satellite communications and data flows — even as media concentration remains an urgent concern.” Since its founding in 2019, the Center has produced research, policy analysis, testimony, and commentary on platform power, media concentration, AI governance, cloud infrastructure, AI content licensing, and the future of independent journalism.
Open Markets Issues Report “Who Do AI Agents Work For? Power and Control in the Next Internet”
The Open Markets Institute released a groundbreaking new report, “Who Do Agents Work For? Power and Control in the Next Internet,” alerting policymakers to a fundamental choice they must grapple with as the agentic web transforms the economy — whether AI agents must primarily represent the interests of users versus the interests of the corporations that deploy them. Senior fellow and the report author Sally Hubbard said, “If an AI agent is controlled by a corporation whose profits depend on surveillance, addiction, manipulating users with hyper-targeted content, or extracting tolls, how can that agent really serve users?” The report lays out several recommendations for policymakers, including applying traditional real-world fiduciary duties to AI agents that perform the functions of human agents; establishing strong protections against surveillance, using the data protections given to corporate users of AI agents as a model; and requiring meaningful transparency and auditing of AI agents. Read the full report here.
📝 WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO:
The Open Markets Institute urged the European Commission to launch a full investigation into Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers, warning that merging two of Hollywood’s most powerful studios would threaten European filmmakers and distributors, industry workers, and media pluralism. After Disney acquired Fox in 2019, the number of films released annually by the combined company fell by 40%, and the Paramount-Warner deal risks repeating the same pattern, OMI argued. OMI’s submission was covered in The Capital Forum.
The Open Markets Institute filed an amicus brief urging the Ninth Circuit to uphold a verdict against Biosense Webster, arguing the medical device manufacturer used its dominance in cardiac-mapping technology to block lower-cost medical device reprocessing and preserve monopoly control over repair and replacement markets. “This case is about protecting hospitals, patients, and innovators from coercive conduct that blocks lower-cost alternatives and entrenches corporate control over essential medical technologies,” said Tara Pincock, policy counsel at OMI and co-author of the brief.
Open Markets Institute Europe and partners hosted a discussion in Brussels on the EU’s new draft merger guidelines, chaired by Member of the European Parliament Ramus Andresen and attended by officials from the European Commission. OMI Europe director Max von Thun welcomed the guidelines’ emphasis on the broader societal objectives of robust merger control, including protecting workers, strengthening resilience, and safeguarding democracy. But he warned that the guidelines’ disproportionate focus on the benefits of scale and efficiency risk accelerating harmful consolidation within the European market. Partners included Rebalance Now, Balanced Economy Project, SOMO, and Article 19.
Open Markets Institute Europe and Rebalance Now hosted a roundtable in Brussels titled “Reclaiming Power: The Role of Competition Policy in Achieving Digital Sovereignty.” The purpose of the roundtable was to bridge the digital competition and digital sovereignty agendas, exploring both potential synergies and tensions. Speakers from the European Commission, the European Parliament, civil society, and European industry debated a range of policy instruments, in particular the Digital Markets Act and the Cloud and AI Development Act. The discussion was covered by Chatham House rules.
Center for Media and Digital Governance at Open Markets director Courtney Radsch published an article in Tech Policy Press lauding a new rule by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority that forces Google to give publishers the opportunity to opt out of having their content used in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and broader generative AI services. “If AI systems derive value from news content, the organizations that invest in reporting, fact-finding, and accountability journalism must have meaningful leverage in determining the terms of that relationship,” Radsch wrote. CMDG@OMI also released a statement on the decision, saying it “marked the first time that a competition regulator has placed publisher protections at the forefront of AI enforcement.”
CMDG@OMI director Courtney Radsch wrote an article for the Brookings Institution warning that AI companies are cannibalizing the journalism they depend on, while emerging licensing markets risk repeating Big Tech’s failures unless policymakers establish fair compensation, transparency, and collective bargaining frameworks. “The window for intervention is narrowing. The terms, if policymakers don’t set them, will be set by the largest tech firms with the biggest budgets,” Radsch wrote. The article built on the April CMDG report, “Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths,” which received coverage in Digital Content Next. Radsch discussed similar themes on the Pondering AI podcast hosted by analytics firm SAS.
Open Markets Europe policy and advocacy lead Giorgos Verdi spoke at a roundtable discussion on strengthening the EU’s digital economy at the European Parliament in Brussels. In his remarks, Verdi highlighted how the EU’s dependence on U.S. tech giants in industries such as cloud and AI is the main factor that has constrained the continent’s innovation capacity.
OMI Europe research analyst Claire Lavin participated in a workshop in Brussels hosted by the European Commission on the draft merger guidelines, where discussions focused on scale, innovation and investment, non-price parameters, and efficiencies.
Open Markets and allied consumer groups urged federal officials to scrutinize United Airlines’s conduct at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, warning that its expansion strategy is designed to eliminate the unique hub-to-hub competition that currently exists between United and American Airlines at O’Hare, the only major U.S. airport where two legacy carriers maintain competing hubs. Open Markets Transportation Policy analyst Arnav Rao said, “Federal regulators should not wait for another merger proposal before addressing the structural problems that are allowing dominant carriers to consolidate control over the nation’s air travel infrastructure.”
The Toronto Star quoted CMDG@OMI director Courtney Radsch on Canada’s AI strategy, which includes investing in homegrown AI companies as an alternative to U.S.-based corporations. “The Silicon Valley bros are all about scale,” she was quoted as saying, adding that AI firms with “smaller, better, higher-quality data sets” can be just as good if not better than the big platforms. In a second Toronto Star story cautioning Canadian authorities to pause before going all in on AI, she was quoted as saying, “What are the objectives? What is the point of AI adoption?”
🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:
Last week, the European Commission ordered Meta to restore free access to WhatsApp for rival AI assistants and maintain it until the end of the Commission’s antitrust investigation. Last year, the Commission opened an antitrust investigation into Meta’s new policy to block access for rival AI providers to WhatsApp. The Commission said if Meta does not comply with the order, it will have to pay daily penalties. The action marked the first time in two decades that the Commission has imposed interim measures. (European Commission)
The European Commission earlier this month unveiled a series of measures aimed at reducing Europe’s dependence on U.S. tech platforms, including one key measure called the Cloud and AI Development Act that will help foster homegrown cloud computing. Announced in a statement from European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, the proposed rules must be approved by all 27 member-states. Officials said they wanted to ensure that sensitive data was stored in Europe and that there was no “kill switch” that could cut off the continent. (CNBC)
Meta this month introduced new safety features for teenagers on Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger worldwide. The new controls will limit posts about topics like nutrition, weight lifting, and anxiety in teenagers’ feeds. The changes mark Facebook’s first major response to being found liable for harming youth by juries in New Mexico and Los Angeles this past spring. (New York Times)
A U.S. district judge approved a $38 billion settlement between Visa and Mastercard and merchants who accused credit card duopoly of charging excessive swipe fees, which brought in $119 billion to credit card companies last year. The settlement would resolve a class action suit filed by more than 12 million merchants over two decades ago. (Yahoo Finance)
📈 VITAL STAT:
$23.5 billion
The value of a major French telecoms deal that will soon undergo a complex antirust review and test the EU’s appetite for consolidation in the industry. French telecoms groups Bouygues, Orange, and Iliad-owned Free agreed earlier ths month to buy SFR. If approved, the deal will be one of the biggest European telecom tie-ups in recent years. (Le Monde)
📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:
The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age: In his book, University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow traces the history of targeted advertising. While personalization has posed problems in the past, the advent of generative AI makes targeted advertising a greater threat than ever to our privacy and democracy.