Regulating dependency : The political stakes of online platforms’ deals with French publishers

At a time when the news industry is struggling to cope with the dominance of the advertising market by large platforms, along with recent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, commercial deals and regulatory initiatives are becoming increasingly common. While there is ample space for regulatory interventions seeking to level the playing field between news industry stakeholders and platforms, we are concerned these might further cement the dependency of the former on the latter through co-regulatory frameworks that epitomize the capture of vital infrastructures by platforms. This article examines the three-year negotiation of French news publishers with Google and Meta, which concluded with four framework agreements being signed. For our analysis, we first look at the historical trajectory of how these deals were made possible, using secondary sources such as leaks, press releases and the French Competition Authority’s rulings; we then discuss their details and implications. We trace Google’s attempt to capture news media in France and discuss the asymmetrical power it has exercised over the news industry, and how the subsequent deals with Meta were affected. Finally, our case study shows that these frameworks are not sufficient to tackle systemic imbalances – despite their good intentions – because they fail to challenge the concentration of power by a handful of oligopolistic private companies and, thus, effectively leave it up to them and the free mar-ket’s idiosyncrasies to decide how they are implemented


Introduction
During the past few years, the discussion around the remuneration of news publishers by digital platforms such as search engines and social media has reignited public interest. What was once seen as ineffective or even impossible is now gaining traction in several countries, with perhaps the most prominent examples being France and Australia. Currently, policymakers in many countries are drafting or passing legislation seeking to regulate the relationship between press publishers and mainly US-based technological companies. This is primarily due to the news industry's need for new revenue streams, given the structural decline in traditional resources such as subscriptions and advertising. The digital platforms' gargantuan profits make them an ideal target for regulation intended to develop sustainable business models for journalism, especially since Google and Meta 1 have already been funneling money into the news media industry worldwide (Fanta and Dachwitz, 2020;Schiffrin, 2021;Papaevangelou, 2023).
This article examines the three-year negotiations between French news publishers and Google and Meta, which concluded with: a five-year deal struck in November 2021 between Google and Agence-France Presse (AFP); 2 a three-year deal signed in March 2022 between the Alliance de la Presse d'Information Générale (APIG) -the largest union of French daily newspapersand Google, and between APIG and Meta signed in October 2021; and, last, a three-year deal between the Syndicat des Éditeurs de la Presse Magazine 3 (SEPM) and Google in March 2022 (Rosemain, 2021). For our analysis, we look at the historical trajectory of how these deals were made possible and study them to identify similarities and differences. In the following sections, we examine the details of each deal by analyzing secondary sources such as leaks, press releases and rulings of the French competition authority, the Autorité de la Concurrence (ADLC). It should be noted that we did not analyze the documents from a legal standpoint; that is, we did not look closely into technical details, as we were mostly interested in their political-economic impact on the relationship between publishers and platforms.
We also show how France has served as the setting for many developments in regulating the publisher-platform relationship, from AFP's lawsuit against Google in 2006(Cozens, 2005 to the creation of Google's Digital Innovation Fund in 2013, and the French publishers' complaint to the ADLC in 2021. Furthermore, we trace Google's attempt to capture news media in France and we examine the asymmetrical power it has wielded over the news industry. We demonstrate how Google's stance and the ADLC's decisions affected the outcome of the negotiations, including the deals signed with Meta. We explain how the EU attempted to satisfy publishers through copyright regulation, that is by creating a right to remuneration for the reuse 1. Formerly known as Facebook. 2. <https://www.afp.com/sites/default/files/afpcommunique/202111/pdf/cpafpgooglefr.pdf>. 3. Association of magazine press publishers. of their content by infomediary platforms. However, this is just a part of a larger mosaic that brings together the political economy of platform governance along with issues of competition, privacy, platform funding, lobbying and others. With this case study, we wish to shed light on the ongoing transformation of the relationship between news organizations and online intermediaries which organize, curate, distribute and, increasingly, fund news content. All these dimensions are essential to understanding the complex functioning of the contemporary digital public sphere, and we aspire for our paper to contribute to this scholarly endeavor.

Literature review
Platforms have practically reconfigured the means of production and distribution of, as well as access to, cultural products, including news (Nieborg and Poell, 2018;Smyrnaios and Rebillard, 2019). The concept of a platform signifies a figurative bridging of two or more parties, thereby acting as an intermediary. However, as several scholars have argued, this metaphor obscures the question of liability for data and content circulation, as well as the agency that is exercised by platforms through algorithmic content curation (Gillespie, 2010;Bucher, 2018). The phenomenon of "infomediation" (Siapera, 2013;Smyrnaios and Rebillard, 2019) has enabled platforms to assume an authoritative role in defining, either directly or indirectly, the limits of freedom of expression and consequently how public discourse is constructed. As a result, it is crucial to critically discuss what this implies for the future of our public sphere, which predominantly exists online and is governed by private platforms (van Dijck and Poell, 2015;Napoli, 2019).
We also employ the concept of "infrastructural capture", a term used by Nechushtai to describe "situations in which an organization tasked with scrutinizing another organization, institution, business or industry is incapable of operating sustainably without the resources or services they provide" (Nechushtai, 2018(Nechushtai, : 1046. The concept of capture derives from the economic theory of "regulatory capture" (Stigler, 1971), which was effectively a way of claiming that regulation might be designed by or for industry stakeholders instead of prioritizing public interest. The related concept of "media capture" was subsequently used to frame an identical situation, in which media actors are working to ensure the preservation of the status quo, often with potential benefits to governments or corporations (Schiffrin, 2014). The concept of infrastructural capture, then, is used to analyze the risk of media organizations' dependency on platform infrastructure, with clear threats to their independence and the way news is produced (Sebbah, Sire and Smyrnaios, 2020).
Finally, we draw on the work of Smyrnaios and Rebillard (2019) to understand how the French news industry has historically spearheaded negotiations with infomediaries, a process characterized by "[the] dominance of the infomediaries over publishers and, simultaneously, a collusion between these two types of actors that leads the latter to dilute their editorial autonomy while the former gain power over news production and distribution" (Smyrnaios and Rebillard, 2019: 45).

Methods, corpus and case study selection
Qualitative methods are widely preferred by researchers studying institutional processes of a given field and, largely, the political-economic implications of regulatory development. More specifically, case studies are often best suited for looking closely at a particular issue and examining it through close reading, paying attention to its nuances and its unique sociopolitical context (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018: 557). We consider our paper to be a "detailed examination of an aspect of a historical episode to develop or test historical explanations that may be generalizable to other events" (George and Bennett, 2005: 5).
Furthermore, our methodological and analytical approach was inspired by a scholarly analysis of the Australian New Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) passed in 2021, and how it was developed (Flew and Wilding, 2021). Specifically, Flew and Wilding analyzed a report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) that examined the dominance that Google and Meta hold over traditional news media publishers (Flew and Wilding, 2021: 51).
For this paper, we studied relevant documentary materials, namely ADLC's decisions; a parliamentary report on the application and impact of related rights; 4 press releases from all negotiating parties involved; and numerous news articles containing information on the story's development. We also conducted in-depth interviews with stakeholders, essentially with publishers. 5 More specifically, the two decisions of the Authority examined here are 20-MC-01 of 09/04/2020 6 and 21-D-17 of 12/07/2021. 7 The former refers to the decision made by ADLC to grant the requests of the press publishers, namely APIG, SEPM and AFP, which had lodged an official complaint with the Authority against Google's implementation of the French law transposing the European Directive on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market, 8 which introduced a related right for press publishers allowing them to demand remuneration for the (re)use of their content by intermediaries. 4. "Neighbouring rights", "ancillary rights" and "related rights" are used interchangeably in this article. They describe the rights of a creative work not connected with the work's actual author -in this case rights on content that are granted to publishers. We choose to use "related rights" as it is the term used in the European directive. 5. This is because out efforts to contact Google and Meta proved unfruitful. 6. <https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/en/decision/requests-interim-measuressyndicat-des-editeurs-de-la-presse-magazine-alliance-de-la>. 7. <https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/en/press-release/remuneration-related-rightspress-publishers-and-agencies-autorite-fines-google-500>. 8. <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj>. France has historically been at the epicenter of policymaking in relation to regulating publisher-platform relationships. For instance, in 2013, Google responded to pressure from the French government by creating a €60 million fund "to support press publishers' innovation projects, which was the blueprint for the DNI & the GNI" 9 (Fanta and Dachwitz, 2020: 89). Going even further back, the tumultuous launch of Google News in France in 2003 caused many French publishers, which were members of an association called Groupement des Éditeurs de Services en Ligne (GESTE) 10 , to temporarily withdraw their content from Google News (Smyrnaios, 2021). More recently, France was the first country to transpose the new copyright directive in 2019, showing the political will to regulate the relationship between press publishers and platforms, well before the Australian NMBC became law. For all these reasons, the way that this issue played out could set a precedent and, thus, impact the way that other countries attempt to regulate said relationship. It also serves as a prime example of the political-economic stakes of this relationship, with implications that go beyond the news industry.

Results
In this section, we look at the key developments indicated in the timeline we created to help readers contextualize the discussion (Fig. 1).

The road to the updated European Copyright Directive and Google's role
France was the first member state in the EU to transpose the revamped European Copyright Directive, which, among others, included Article 15 regarding the "Protection of press publications concerning online uses". 11 This Article introduced a related right to copyright for press publishers, thus opening the way for publishers to start receiving some sort of remuneration for the (re)use of their content -including indexing in search engines -by online intermediaries (Danbury, 2021). This right expires by default two years after the appearance date of a press publication (Art 15(4)).
It is worth noting here that Germany passed a similar law in 2013 in a bid to make Google pay for indexing news content. 12 However, due to the law's vague language, Google proceeded with listing only links to articles on its search engine, and thus was able to avoid paying for the license demanded. As a result, German publishers had to waive their right to remuneration, as their readership coming via Google plummeted (Nordemann and Jehle, 2019 Similarly, in 2014, the Spanish government passed a stricter law that essentially made it illegal for online services to use snippets of content without payment to the Spanish Association of Newspaper Publishers (Smith, 2014). Google retaliated by removing all Spanish media from the Spanish version of Google News for almost eight years, only for it to be re-activated after Spain complied with the new European copyright framework (Vincent, 2021).
Another similar story of platform power asymmetry played out in Australia, when Meta blocked dozens of news pages on Facebook following approval of the NMBC, including those of government and health officials (Taylor, 2021). Recently, whistleblowers have claimed that these pages were not affected by accident, as the company had previously argued, but that everything was part of Meta's deliberate strategy to improve its negotiating position (Taylor, 2022).
Following a historical institutionalist approach, we can indeed infer that "different countries or societies can develop dramatically different institutional responses to the same macrosocial structures" (Bannerman and Haggart, 2015: 5). Interestingly, though, the response of platforms in all the examples cited remains effectively the same: in addition to more traditional lobbying practices, they have been leveraging their power through censorship and media deplatformization in order to influence policymaking, with little regard for the public interest.

The role of the French Competition Authority
As noted above, a couple of months after France implemented the European Directive as national law, Google unilaterally stopped showing news snippets to its French users 13 unless it had first explicitly received permission from the publishers, which would have amounted to waiving their right to remuneration. This reaction was what caused French publishers to come together and lodge a formal complaint to the ADLC against the way in which Google had interpreted and applied the copyright law, arguing it had "[abused] a dominant position" (ADLC, 2020: 3). The ADLC found Google's practices to be "anti-competitive" (2020: 4) and issued a decision in April 2020 (20-MC-01), ordering interim measures to be applied until the announcement of its final decision, namely that: -Publishers and news agencies had to enter negotiations "in good faith" with Google, within a period of three months after such a request had been made, to discuss both the terms and conditions for the reuse and indexing of their content and the corresponding -retroactive -remuneration (Injunctions 4 & 5); -Google had to provide sufficient information regarding the criteria and parameters of calculating remuneration fees (Injunction 2); -During the period of negotiations, Google had to continue displaying snippets and audiovisual content in its search engine in a neutral way, i.e. without downgrading it (Injunctions 3, 5 & 6); -Finally, Google had to send an initial report to the ADLC on its compliance with the obligations (Injunction 7).
ADLC based its decision on the fact that, at the time, Google "[was] likely to hold a dominant position on the French market for general search services" (ADLC, 2020: 3). Specifically, it argued that "Google may have abused its dominant position to circumvent the Law on Related Rights" for having forced the hand of publishers to waive their right to remuneration by granting free licenses to Google, for not having shared critical information regarding the way of determining the level of remuneration and, last, for having unilaterally blocked short extracts and other audiovisual content from its search engine (ADLC, 2020: 4).
Another important point in the development of our case study was the decision of ADLC on 7 June 2021 (21-D-11) in relation to Google's practices in the online advertising sector in France, which fined the company €200 million for "having abused its dominant position in the market for ad servers for publishers of websites and mobile apps" (ADLC, 2021a: 3). This time, the case was brought to the Authority's attention by News Corp Inc., Groupe Figaro and Groupe Rossel La Voix, all of which are press publishers and important stakeholders in the news industry in France and beyond.
One month later, on 13 July 2021, ADLC issued its final decision (21-D-17) concerning the interim measures that had been announced in its previous decision of April 2020 (20-MC-01). The Authority fined Google €500 million, primarily for not having complied with injunctions 1, 2, 5 and 6; most importantly, the decision condemned Google's attempt to connect the payment of publishers' related rights to their use of the newly launched Google News Showcase. 14 The ADLC also took into consideration the decision of the Paris Court of Appeal of 8 October 2020, which dismissed Google's argument that the company would jeopardize "improvements and innovations" of its services if it complied with all foreseen obligations (ADLC, 2021b: 3).
Subsequently, Google proposed eight commitments to the ADLC, applicable for five years, as remedies for the infringed injunctions (Allen and Overy, 2021), agreeing inter alia to negotiate a separate license for Google News Showcase. This was a concession from Google, which sought, on the 14. Google statement described Showcase as "a licensing program for news publishers that provides a customizable, curated space for news content in Google News and Discover. These are not payments for links, snippets, short extracts, or headlines." <https://news. google.com/news-showcase/>. one hand, to disengage itself from an on-going legal spar with the ADLC and the French news industry, especially shortly after Meta had announced a framework agreement with APIG, and, on the other, to avoid further negative publicity (Cohen, 2021). Through a historical institutionalist lens, this illuminates an institutional change in platform regulation, which Google attempted to oppose but had to ultimately give in to -albeit on its own terms, as we will see.

AFP and APIG, the platforms' favorites
APIG was created in 2018 following the merger of four different unions. The organization brings together and represents nearly 300 political and general news titles, both at the regional and local level, including the most prestigious Paris-based dailies such as Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération. Pierre Louette, the President of APIG and CEO of Groupe Les Echos-Le Parisien, part of the powerful LVMH group, has supported the idea of remunerating the news industry based on related rights, arguing that: "It is the birth of a new category of stable income" (Valentini, 2021). It is also worth noting that Philippe Jannet, the first press executive in the world to formulate a collective demand for remuneration from Google on behalf of the GESTE in 2003 when Google News launched in France, was also CEO of Les Echos at the time. Thus, the same prominent players, mainly Parisian financial and political newspapers, had for years been developing the arguments that were adopted by the French publishers involved in this litigation. APIG was the first among the three complainants to strike an agreement with Google, in January 2021, although it subsequently became inoperable, due to ADLC's second decision in July 2021; finally, a new framework agreement was signed in March 2022. Furthermore, APIG remains the only association to have signed an agreement with Meta regarding related rights. Specifically, the deal with Meta covers a period of three years, with an option to renew, and stipulates that every publisher participating in APIG will receive a minimum remuneration fee, retroactively, i.e. it will cover fees for related rights owed to publishers since the law's implementation in July 2019. Through our interviews we learned that there are three factors that determine the amount of remuneration: (i) the number of Facebook followers; (ii) the number of interactions with publishers' posts; and (iii) the number of visitors outside Facebook, as evaluated by ACPM. 15 So, we could assume that similar parameters exist for determining the amount of remuneration from Google.
Nevertheless, financial details concerning these framework agreements were not made publicly available either for Google or for Meta. A report from Reuters mentioned that the initial deal with Google involved approximately €67 million over three years (Rosemain, 2021); details regarding the second deal were not revealed. For instance, Le Monde would reportedly receive approximately €1.5 million, while a local outlet, La Voix de la Haute Marne, would receive only €12,500. Even though the initial deal is no longer in force, the fact that larger outlets would have received substantially more money than smaller ones reveals two things: on the one hand, that inequalities exist among industry players, and, on the other, that even though collective negotiation made striking deals more likely, it did not necessarily help remedy imbalances.
As we noted above, the French news industry has been at the forefront of demanding remuneration for the reuse of their content by online platforms. A case in point is when AFP sued Google in 2005 for having "breached its copyright by reproducing its pictures and articles" in the Google News section (Cozens, 2005). The two parties settled the lawsuit two years later, with Google paying AFP an undisclosed sum of money to continue displaying content on its services, but further details were never made publicly available (Auchard, 2007;Smyrnaios and Rebillard, 2019: 40). This deal, along with a similar one made with Associate Press, are the first occasions in history when Google agreed to share revenue with a publisher. Currently, AFP is not a part of any of the associations mentioned above. Nonetheless, it decided to collaborate with the other publishers' bid against Google by lodging a complaint to the ADLC. AFP signed its own agreement with Google in November 2021, which, unusually, is valid for five years, compared to the three-year deals signed by the other associations (France24, 2022).
Fabrice Fries, CEO of AFP, also stated in the parliamentary hearings that the international status and elevated prestige of the news agency helped secure a higher level of remuneration than that obtained by other publishers (Duby-Muller and Garcia, 2022: 65). As a result, we would be remiss not to mention here some of the other financial arrangements between AFP and the two largest private funders of journalism, Google and Meta. Specifically, AFP has become one of the most important fact-checking organizations worldwide, with the support of the platforms and the French government. In December 2021, a month after signing the agreement on related rights, Google and AFP announced their collaboration on a fact-checking project called Objectif Desinfox, relating to the French presidential and legislative elections of 2022; 16 this was seen as an expansion of their previous work on election-related fact-checking for the previous presidential elections in 2017. This time, the two parties created a coalition of 21 French news organizations coordinated by AFP which aimed to combine forces to combat disinformation, which put AFP in a rather privileged position within the media ecosystem. Also, AFP is currently the largest partner of Meta's Third-Party Fact-Checking Network (Goldshlager, 2019).

Magazines and independent online publishers: the outsiders
SEPM is the leading association of magazine publishers for the general public in France; it was first formed in 1982 but merged with the Syndicat Professionnel de la Presse Magazine et d'Opinion (SPPMO) in 2012, 17 and now represents 80 publishers and more than 400 magazines across France. 18 SEPM was the last association to sign an agreement with Google, in April 2022, following another complaint lodged on 10 January 2022 (Cohen, 2022). This time, the complaint was filed solely by SEPM, as the other two associations had already signed different agreements. SEPM argued that Google had not "respected" the injunctions announced by ADLC, indicating that the company had likely negotiated different terms with the other complainants. In any case, it seems that the pressure put on Google by that last complaint, along with its wish to conclude negotiations with the French news industry, opened the way for a framework agreement that will last three years, with Google distributing around €20 million per year to the association's participants (OFFREMEDIA, 2022).
Moreover, it should be noted that one major point of contention between APIG and SEPM was that the latter did not accept Google's framing of the scope of related rights: Google wanted the definition to cover solely publications that fell under the umbrella term "political and general information", to which APIG agreed. 19 In fact, ADLC's 21-D-17 decision specifically condemned that framing, which would exclude numerous media from benefiting from related rights (ADLC, 2021b: 83).
Finally, in June 2021, SEPM joined forces with la Fédération Nationale de la Presse d'Information Spécialisée (FNPS), which represents "specialized and professional" press, and with le Syndicat de la Presse d'Information Indépendante en Ligne (Spiil), which represents independent online media, to launch a dedicated collective copyright management organization that will collect and distribute remuneration for related rights among member publishers. As the Parliamentary Report on the application of the law on related rights in France noted, such organizations "limit the [market] distortions without favoring the big publications and allowing the smaller ones to defend themselves" (Duby-Muller and Garcia, 2022: 51). This happens through the method of péréquation, i.e. balancing costs or revenue among different parties to achieve a fairer distribution than that obtained through simple market mechanisms. 20 However, neither AFP nor APIG, who appear to be Google's 17. <https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sppmo.
org%2FLe-2-mai-dernier-le- . In France, media publishers that meet the criteria of Article 1 of the decree of 29 October 2009 may be recognised as providing "political and general information" (IPG), which makes them eligible for public funding and tax breaks. 20. In France, the newspaper distribution system is traditionally based on a collective mechanism of péréquation, i.e., the distribution of costs among publishers to assure diversity and pluralism.
privileged contacts, have yet joined this organization, which significantly weakens its negotiating power. Therefore, one can observe that power asymmetries characterize not only the relationship between publishers and platforms, but also those between different news industry stakeholders themselves.

Conclusions
Meta and Google are among the largest benefactors of journalism worldwide, with their Meta Journalism Project (MJP) and Google News Initiative (GNI) respectively (Fanta and Dachwitz, 2020;Jurno and D'Andréa, 2020). Indeed, Meta and Google have claimed that they have so far invested more than $900 million in the news industry, and between them have pledged to spend close to $1.5 billion (Scutari, 2022). 21 These funding initiatives are distinct from the licensing programs they offer, such as Google News Showcase or Facebook News, or other commercial services such as Subscribe with Google. As a result, we are left in the dark regarding the figures for their funding for journalism programs, and we lack exact information about the reach of these initiatives due to the opaqueness and complexity of their activities. A case in point, which is also related to our case study, is when Google signed individual agreements with more than a dozen French news organizations between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. (Duby-Muller and Garcia, 2022: 65). However, neither the content nor the amounts involved were disclosed. These agreements were based on related rights but were made outside the remits of the associations, even though some of these organizations, like Le Monde, partake in them; the selected publishers were also given privileged access to services such as Subscribe and Showcase. Consequently, we believe that this "divide and conquer" strategy among monopolistic digital platforms contributes to further fragmenting the news ecosystem and weakening smaller publishers. The same applies to audiovisual media and, particularly, TV channels; we did not include them in our study because they do not participate in the negotiations sanctioned by the French public authorities. However, the largest ones, such as the TF1 group, have signed deals of mutual agreement, notably with Google, including favorable revenue sharing for content published on YouTube. 22 Furthermore, while the ADLC played a positive role in limiting platforms' leverage, we also ought to underline the political context which undermined its work in favor of monopolistic platforms. France, alongside Germany, has been among the frontrunners leading the regulatory race in the EU. We could argue, thus, that there existed a political willingness to regulate US-based tech giants. French President Emmanuel Macron, though, did not renew the tenure of Isabelle de Silva, head of ADLC, because they did not see eye-to-eye regarding merger rules, with the former wanting softer rules that 21. <https://www.facebook.com/journalismproject/introducing-facebook-journalism-project>. 22. <https://www.reuters.com/article/ofrin-tf1-youtube-idFRKCN0IY27Q20141114>. would allow for a greater concentration of companies, so that French and European technological companies could "better compete against the United States and China" (Leali and Kayali, 2021). However, the swift and unprecedented decisions of ADLC during de Silva's tenure, condemning the harmful practices of Google, makes the above reasoning questionable. We believe that, as with the agreement to create the DNI in 2013 by François Hollande and Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt, the French government demonstrates a preference for the market to self-regulate, even if this means perpetuating power imbalances among stakeholders.
To summarize, this paper set out to discuss the political economy of regulation of the relationship between press publishers and online intermediaries. We examined the three-year negotiations between a large part of the French news industry and dominant technological companies, specifically Google and Meta, and we inferred the following: i. Collective bargaining is more effective for news publishers in their efforts to negotiate commercial deals with online platforms but is also harder to organize because of market fragmentation and opposing interests. ii. There exists not only a power asymmetry between publishers and platforms but also among publishers themselves, e.g., with larger news organizations securing better deals, participating in separate commercial arrangements with platforms, and refusing to join a collective management organization. iii. Independent judicial authorities can play a positive role in regulating platforms and their relationship with other governance stakeholders such as press publishers if there is an enabling political and institutional environment. iv. Monopolistic platforms avoid sharing details of deals to ensure a fragmented negotiating front and to deter smaller publishers from increasing their demands. v. They also unilaterally utilize their power, in cases where they cannot avoid regulation, to enforce their interpretation of regulatory frameworks and, thus, influence policymaking and policy-enforcement.
In conclusion, our article highlights the existing risk of expanding the platformization of news (Nieborg and Poell, 2018) by attempting to force services like Google News Showcase onto the publishers. At a time when the news industry is struggling to cope with the dominance of large platforms in the advertising space, along with recent crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, commercial deals and regulatory initiatives are bound to become increasingly common. While there is ample scope for regulatory interventions seeking to level the playing field among news organizations and platforms, we are concerned these might further cement the dependency of the former on the latter through co-regulatory frameworks (Ouakrat, 2020: 51-52) that enable plat-forms to capture vital infrastructures (Nechushtai, 2018). We believe that these frameworks are not sufficient to tackle systemic imbalances -even if they mean well -because they fail to challenge the concentration of power among a handful of oligopolistic private companies, and thus give way to platforms and to the free market's idiosyncrasies to decide how they are implemented. Similarly, the lack of political will to democratize access to this new source of revenue for all publishers, for instance through a collective management system of related rights, may contribute to further concentration of the media industry, and may thus limit pluralism of opinions in the public sphere. Future research should focus on studying the progressively contentious relationship between publishers and platforms concerning issues beyond funding as well.