Future Media w/ Ricky Sutton and Chapell

Denmark may be famous for Lego, Ozempic, and a Bluetooth named after a Viking king — but its next export could be a new model for media power in the AI era. It’s rallied 99 per cent of the country’s publishers and broadcasters into a collective licensing body designed to negotiate with Big Tech, and the result is already looking less like Scandinavian hygge and more like a Viking bloodbath. At the...

South Africa just announced the most intriguing deal I’ve seen yet for tech platforms to support premium publishers. It follows Australia deals in Canada, Europe, the UK, Denmark and a growing list of others testing multi-year, multi-million-dollar arrangements, and at first glance, the package looks familiar: Money for content. But then it turns into new territory. Google has agreed to let users...

Bouncing around LinkedIn the other day I stumbled on a post by one of the smartest people I know. Stuart Forrest runs audience development for global media group Bauer, and he was pondering the future of search. He made a strong argument that AI Overviews - and its big brother AI Mode - can’t be Google's end game because it kills its US$198 billion search ads cash cow. Instead, his money’s on a be...

Two former Meta leaders are breaking their silence on Australia’s world-first under-16s social media ban. The law is just weeks old, and we’ve heard plenty from government, parents and kids - but less from the people who understand, from the inside, how Meta thinks about safety, incentives, and enforcement. My guests are a former Meta director Kelly Stonelake who worked on Mark Zuckerberg’s metave...

Last year, Google pulled a move only a trillion-dollar giant would try. It literally wrote the US government a cashier’s cheque for a little over $2 million so it could dodge a jury in the Justice Department’s ad-tech monopoly case and face a judge alone. By paying the damages the DOJ said it was owed, Google turned the whole thing into a bench trial in Virginia - no unpredictable jurors, just one...

Australia was the first to make tech pay for journalism with a trailblazing News Media Bargaining Code. Five years on, those deals with Google and Meta are expiring. Meta's walked away. Google's signing one-year extensions. A new government wants a News Bargaining Incentive – a tax on Big Tech that says: Pay publishers for the content you use, or pay the taxman instead. So what happens? And should...

On December 10, Australia will drop a legal hammer and become the first country in the world to ban social media accounts for under-16s. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, X, and Threads are all caught in the dragnet and face fines if they stuff it up. It sets a frightening precedent for platforms which have banked trillions by being unregulated - and as the deadline has appro...

Today we're joined by one of the most influential figures in journalism. Danielle Coffey is President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance and was just named one of the most powerful women in Washington. She’s leading a global charge on behalf of 2,000 news and magazine publishers to reshape how journalism is protected, funded and valued in the digital age. She talks about AI theft, Google powe...

Google’s former global news chief has a blunt warning: The world is quietly voting against facts. And when Google Search throttled news in Australia and Canada during a high-stakes regulatory standoff… almost nobody noticed. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Richard Gingras has been one of the most influential figures at the intersection of news and tech over the past 40 years. He’s seen it from multiple angles: As a journalist, as an internet pioneer - but most notably as VP of Google News, and the architect of the Google News Initiative. He shares tough truths and triggering insights about how he sees news failing in a fracturing digital landscape....

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” It’s a line we’ve all heard, but in an AI-powered world of constant surveillance, it’s never felt truer - or scarier. Today’s guest is someone who has spent years trying to fix it. Joe Jerome is the Senior Public Policy Manager at DuckDuckGo - the search engine that built a business by saying no to surveillance. No cookies, no creepy tra...

Marc Choquette  heads SEO at  The Boston Globe  and has lived in the blast radius of Google since 2009, but he’s a numbers guy and he’s seen something new and exciting. He says the data shows that AI isn’t flattening everything evenly, and sites built on original, local, can’t-fake-it reporting are seeing gains. Marc joins  Alan Chapell  and I to share the Globe’s playbook...

Tech giant Cloudflare jolted the tech and publishing world when it announced it was stepping in as a traffic cop to protect publishers from AI's training on their content without permission. Alan and I are joined by Will Allen, Cloudflare’s VP of Product, to unpack whether this is really the turning point in what’s been, so far, a losing battle for content creators. See Privacy Policy at https://a...

Antitrust professor John Newman - veteran of both the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission - hasn’t minced words about Google’s monopoly in search. Today, he explains why the judge’s remedies miss the mark in both law and tone, how publishers and other victims can push back, and why a new generation of lawyers is preparing to fight for tougher rules to save the open web. See P...

Ad chief Joshua Lowcock was a key witness alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in the antitrust trial that exposed Google’s dominance in both search and advertising. As global chief media officer at UM Worldwide, he oversaw billions in ad spend for some of the world’s biggest brands. His unflinching testimony helped the court rule Google held an ad tech monopoly. Today, he reveals what comes next...

Shoshana Wodinsky was a tech reporter for Gizmodo, AdWeek, and MarketWatch until reporting wasn’t enough. So she joined the US Federal Trade Commission. Soon, she was in the room with former chair Lina Khan, shaping decisions on Big Tech mergers and global privacy. Now she’s part of a new wave of journalists helping regulators swap out theory for real-world experience. See Privacy Policy at https:...

The Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser has led the charge against Google’s trio of monopolies in search, ad tech and app stores. As lead counsel for 38 US states, he had an influential say in the multi-year investigation that backed the US Department of Justice, and landed the landmark wins in court. Now, with verdicts in and remedies imminent, AG Weiser has a rare kind of power. His office wil...

Four billion people use Chrome to access the web but after three antitrust losses, the Department of Justice has demanded the browser is spun out and handed to a new custodian to power the next generation of the open web. We are joined by leading voices in tech policy and browser tech to discuss how big a job that actually is. Alissa Cooper is the executive director of the Knight Georgetown Instit...

Tim Cowen of Preiskel & Co joins Alan Chapell to discuss Google's antitrust woes, and the Movement for an Open Web's call for DOJ to more effectively harmonize the various remedies Google's antitrust trials given the interdependencies between the cases. They also compare and contrast the UK CMA's approach to reigning in Google Chrome with the DOJ's proposed use of a technical committee. See Pr...

Ricky Sutton and Chapell talk with competition and regulatory attorney Gene Burrus about Apple's participation in EU Digital Markets Act workshops. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

New York's Attorney General has alleged it lied and “engaged in repeated and persistent fraud” to build its $16 billion business in America, including lying to users about privacy, targeting kids, harming them, and hiding the damage it caused. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Respected attorney and regulatory analyst Megan Gray sat in the pews through Google’s recent search remedies trial. After terms at the Federal Trade Commission and DuckDuckGo she has unique insights into how Google and The White House view the break-up. Some are quite spicy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-in...

It’s hard to believe that Google's going to be broken. It feels safer to hide behind the sofa and pretend it isn’t happening. Only it is coming, and regulators have devised a complex plan, which includes selling Google's ad exchange AdX and its ad server DFP, as well as publishing the data of some of Google's most closely kept secrets. The actions will change the $1.2 trillion global ad market for...

Big Tech's momentum and power has enabled it to roll over rules and laws that have existed for centuries.  Individually, this might make sense to spur progress, but collectively it's causing major damage.  Laws like copyright are being crushed in the race to the future, and efforts to rein it in are leading to angst and firings.  Not paying for content would look absurd in almost any other context...

Ricky and Alan are joined by EU competition lawyer Damien Geradin of Geradin Partners. Damien has done great work helping to address the competition issues caused by big tech over the years - and share's his thoughts on the current state of competition law throughout Europe. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-in...