Governance of news aggregators’ practices across five emblematic cases: Policy regimes between normative acceptance and resistance

Abstract

During the 2005–2015 decade, news publishers, governments, and digital news aggregators re-negotiated the parameters of control over the circulation of digital content. Using governance and regime theory, we analyze five emblematic cases—Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom—of early governance reactions to news aggregators’ practices and identify different types of strategies: (1) discursive resistance; (2) controlled drop-out; (3) one-time payments; (4) opt-in ancillary copyright law; and (5) strict ancillary copyright law. Through contextualizing and triangulating, we explain the nuanced ways in which legacy actors struggled to find adequate strategies to maintain their definitional power when technology companies first manifested their interest in the news sector. The findings indicate a link between the strength of policy regimes that sustained copyright as a normative monopoly and shifts in normative interpretations. With that, we highlight the importance of considering policy regimes’ constituencies as an explanatory dimension when studying change and maintenance in media governance.

Keywords:

• Governance of contents
• digital policies
• news aggregators
• normative acceptance
• normative resistance
• policy regimes

Notes

1 The regime approach differs therefore from the metrics commonly used to assess and explain developments shaping the media landscape, such as press subsidies, market concentration, and consumer habits (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Humphreys 2012). Instead, in this article, the underlying policy regimes with their related actors, administrative settings, endorsed or neglected ideas, principles, and values are analyzed to theorize normative shifts in the governance of news aggregators’ practices between 2005 and 2015.

2 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Chapter IV, Section 5.

3 UKSC 18, on appeal from: [2011] EWCA Civ 890.

4 LDA, Chapter I, Art.10, sole paragraph.

5 LAD, Chapter V, §1.

Additional information

Funding

This study has been supported by the SFU Presidential Start-up Fund and by the Fund for Faculty Members with English as an additional language granted by the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University.