 The next panel is about probably one of the almost assuredly one of the most important issues or important challenges that we face in the United States and actually around the world right now, which is this, how do we handle the concentration of control that is taking place over the information that we rely on? You know, at New America we've done, at the Open Markets Program, we've done a lot of work on looking at the book market and Amazon's control over the book market and the ways in which Amazon uses its power to manipulate the flow of books and ideas between the citizen as an author and the citizen as a reader. It's an unprecedented power that that company has. It's a power that has not been properly looked into thus far. We see it also increasingly with the news. As we're going to hear today, this is an issue with journalism, with the concentration of power over journalism by companies such as Facebook and Google. So the moderator of this next panel is a very good friend of mine. He's one of the heroes of our effort thus far. It's Paul Glastres and he is the executive editor of the Washington Monthly. And Paul is someone who struggles every day to keep a truly independent magazine alive, which is, that's harder than getting Elizabeth Warren's deliver a speech on monopoly. And Paul has managed to do this over the years and while doing that he's actually published some of our most important pieces that we've put out in these last few years and has been really, truly fundamental to our effort. And I'll leave it to Paul to introduce the rest of the panelists. Well, thank you, Barry. Is this on? Can you all hear? I'm very honored that Barry invited me to moderate this. We do work very closely with Barry and Phil Longman and Leah Douglas and Brian Feldman and the others at the Open Markets program at New America. I think what they're doing is going to change America. Maybe on the verge of changing America. I think the speech we just heard from Senator Warren may be something you'll tell your grandkids. We are going to talk now about media information journalism and concentration, which is not only, as Barry said, very important, but also very difficult to talk about in ways that the public can understand. And we're only beginning to understand how this fast moving area is affecting the work we do. And we have a terrific panel. I'm going to introduce them in the order in which they're going to speak and then I'm going to sit back and they're going to have some time to get their thoughts across and then we'll have a very short back and forth and I want to open the floor up to your questions. Dr. Martin Moore is with us. He's Director of the Center for the Study of Media Communication and Power and a Senior Research Fellow in the Policy Institute at Kings College London. He was previously Founding Director of the Media Standards Trust where he directed the election unspun project and wrote extensively on the news media and public policy. He's the author of a powerful and insightful paper, Tech Giants and Civic Power, published this spring. Dr. Justin Schlossberg is a media lecturer and researcher at Birkbeck University of London and the current Chair of the Media Reform Coalition. He's the author of two books about the media and has produced a number of recent reports on press freedom and media plurality for organizations including the Open Societies Institute and the European Endowment for Democracy. He regularly advises British MPs on a range of media policy issues. His most recent paper is The Mission of Media in an Age of Monopoly for Republica, published also this spring. TJ Styles is a celebrated American biographer. His 2009 book The First Tycoon, the Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt won the National Book Award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His book, Custer's Trials, A Life on the Frontier of a New America, received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. So yes, if you're counting, that's two Pulitzer prizes. He's also the author of a critically acclaimed biography of Jesse James and is very involved in the author's guild movement. Finally, Melvin Gibbs, a composer, producer, Grammy-nominated songwriter and has been called with reason the best bassist in the world. He played with the Great Punk Funk Jazz Band Defunct, with the Rollins Band, for you hardcore fans out there, with Arto Lindsay and currently with Harriet Tubman and Cassandra Wilson. He is president of the Content Creators Coalition, a membership-based, artist-run, non-profit, AgVisigoo group representing creators in the digital landscape. So Dr. Martin, Dr. Moore, rather. Thank you very much indeed and thank you very much for the invitation. Tom Steinberg, who is a self-confessed technology geek and until recently ran a civil society tech organization called My Society, posted this on Facebook last Friday. He said, I'm actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory. But the filter bubble is so strong and extends so far into things like Facebook's custom search that I can't find anyone who is happy. Despite the fact that over half the country is clearly jubilant today and despite the fact that I'm actively looking to hear what they're saying. Having just come from a very divided country, I'm genuinely worried about how we heal the current divisions and where we can find healthy public spaces that bring together different perspectives. And my fear is that the large tech platforms, rather than making things better, may be making things worse. The New Reuters Institute Digital News Report, which was published just a fortnight ago, found that 51% of the people they surveyed from 26 countries around the world, that was including the US and the UK, regularly use social media as a source of news. And for a third of 18 to 24 year olds, it's now their main news source. And the phrase social media is something of a euphemism since Facebook is by far the dominant social media platform across most of these countries. 44% of all the people surveyed said they used Facebook for news. That's two thirds of all Facebook users. Now, though it's a survey, it's worth spelling out what two thirds of all Facebook users now means. It means 1.1 billion people worldwide. That's four times the total number of people in the US, regularly get their news via Facebook. The numbers of people now using these platforms, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, both of course Facebook owned, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and now so large one has to constantly think of new analogies and comparisons with which to compare them. So the number of WhatsApp users grew between August 2014 and September 2015 by more than the populations of Germany, France, Italy, and the UK combined. And with size comes in most cases dominance. Well over nine of the 10 smartphones sold across the world run on either Google Android or Apple iOS. Google has more than 90% share of general search across European countries. YouTube and Facebook share of desktop video viewing is just under 90%. I could go on. By most people's definitions, this constitutes dominance and dominance at a global level that the companies themselves still for the most part deny it. The trouble is though most people are coming to rely on these huge transnational platforms for news and news organizations are relying on them now for audience and revenue. They're not news organizations and they don't in most cases even acknowledge that they're publishers. This means that amongst other things they don't subscribe to the same practices and values as news organizations and they don't consider themselves to be playing the same semi-constitutional role. So they don't for example see it as their role to ensure a diversity of news. Indeed the way the algorithms work are structured sorry can result in the opposite. They don't see it as their role to report on public affairs. They see that as a job of news organizations and they don't define themselves by their independence from the state. For these reasons though we're coming to rely on them for our news we can't rely on them for our news. We don't even know their positions on freedom of speech. As the editor of BuzzFeed said at the Tower Center or spoke at the Tower Center last week and wrote that the publishing rules of these social media platforms are rooted in no clear precedent tradition or philosophy and seem to be improvised in reaction to circumstance. In practice this means we don't know how they would react to difficult democratic questions. For example how would Facebook respond if a news organization sought to publish Snowden-like leaks via Facebook instant articles? Are we confident that Microsoft would not allow public authorities to listen to a conversation between a journalist and a source on Skype? How much information about an individual's political affiliations would each tech giant share with the authorities? And it's critical to note that these tech giants are not just distribution platforms for news. They're performing an increasing number of civic functions functions we generally associate with journalism or the so-called fourth estate. These include giving people a voice, enabling collective action and political campaigning, holding power to account, influencing our vote and commanding public attention. So we come to rely on Facebook's safety check after emergencies to let our families and family and friends know we're safe. Police and local authorities are using Twitter and Skype as their main means of public communication. Many of us are using Google search and Bing to find out which candidates we should vote for in elections. Now the platforms have acquired these civic roles partly by accident and partly by design, but having acquired them they're also acquiring the civic powers that go with them. As yet we don't know how they'll use this power and to what extent they'll prioritize the protection of citizens over calls from authorities or the demands of their shareholders. We therefore urgently need to figure out how civic protections that were developed in the pre-internet age translate to dominant platforms today, most notably freedom of speech, diversity of news and information and freedom of association. We need to figure out how the laws of the pre-internet age can and should be applied in the post, particularly for example when it comes to elections. We need to decide whether some of these services need to be considered essential and what that means in terms of their responsibilities and accountability and we need to work out how to create an environment to enable competition in a digital information world. None of these would be such a big deal if these companies were not so big and so dominant but they are and they're getting bigger. Britain is currently divided, more so than I've ever known it in my lifetime and over the next weeks and months I sincerely hope we can overcome those divisions and rediscover a sense of common purpose but we only do so if we have shared public spaces and opportunities for dialogue, not filter bubbles and echo chambers. Thank you. Thanks very much to Barry for inviting me and to putting on this extremely important and timely event. I just want to follow up really a lot of what Martin said, share his concerns but I want to just talk about how we navigate our way out of some of these problems. I think that the complexities surrounding concentrated news media power in the information age has really confounded public policy debates in this area. The first thing I want to do is talk just briefly about what I think are two dominant narratives around what's happened, if you like, to the gatekeeping power once vested in owners or editors or journalists. The first is a very optimistic celebratory story that we have entered or are entering a kind of golden age of civic empowerment when it comes to news flows and news agendas that users and citizens are increasingly in the driving seat in determining what is the news and what is the news that matters. This is a story of populism, of democratization of the news and of gatekeeping power being dissolved amongst the many or the crowd. A second narrative, competing narrative, is that the concentrated agenda in gatekeeping power is not so much dissolved but transferred, transferred into the hands of new digital monopolies along the lines that Martin talked about. And in this narrative, the incumbent, if you like, news providers and organizations are the victims. They represent a bygone golden age in which, for all its flaws, the traditional news media made a vital contribution to democratic life. It was able, primarily through its investment in original news gathering, to at least at times and critical moments hold all forms of power and authority to account. Now, there is some truth and empirical basis to substantiate both of these overarching pictures, but I want to suggest to you that both are also flawed in important and conceptual ways. Given the limited time, we're just going to zero in on two particular problems that underpin both these narratives. I think the first concerns what we think of today as a new source, there is a potential blind spot in thinking about Google, Facebook and other information intermediaries as sources in the same way as those that produce original news. This often leads to the misconception that they are direct competitors with publishers, broadcasters or digital native publishers, when in fact they are increasingly integrated in their business models and their structures. So concentration in both of these sectors, the intermediary sector on the one hand and the overall news provider section on the other, is in fact mutually enhancing. We can see this just from the reality that in order to rise above the information noise in the new news environment requires an enormous investment in marketing and in new marketing specialisms and skills that has re-resurrected the barriers to entry in news. But we can also see it most obviously in the fact that over 80 percent of traffic to new online news publishers is referred by digital intermediaries. And on the other side of the coin, the vast majority of news content that is consumed on intermediary platforms like Google, like aggregators such as Yahoo, is in fact produced by still a very small number of incumbent news brands. So it's very important I think that we are not misguided by the combat of rhetoric between traditional publishers and intermediaries and indeed the legal battles that have taken place particularly over copyright between them because they ultimately veil the fundamental synergies and interdependencies. Just like we heard in the panel this morning in Senator Warren's speech, very often market concentration in one market has a reciprocal effect on concentration in another. And I think that's very much the case in the news industries. The second conceptual problem concerns the assumptions that often follow from the fact that news agendas are becoming increasingly personalized. This has led some to argue that we no longer need to be worried about the threat of particular voices coming to dominate public conversation as a whole. But in fact, all the evidence suggests there remains a public media space dominated by a very small number of institutional megaphones. And what's more, these megaphones are amplified rather than muted by intermediaries. To give you just one example, 2011, there was a lot of noise going on Twitter regarding the Occupy protests that were happening, particularly in Wall Street, but in other parts of the U.S. and in other parts of the world. At a certain point, a number of Twitter users began to notice that the Occupy Wall Street hashtag was routinely trending in cities and regions and countries around the world, but not in New York itself. And the same was actually true of Occupy Boston and other hotspots in the direct action. And what was actually discovered in a rather brilliant piece of reverse engineering by Gilad Shetan is that the reason why the hashtag for Occupy Wall Street was not trending in New York was because attention to that hashtag had grown gradually and organically and over a sustained period. And the way in which Twitter's algorithm works is such that it responds primarily to spikes in attention in order to generate or to surface on its trending topics list in any region. And that really is in the new information, what we might call real estate gold for news providers, to get onto trending topic lists. And the cause of those spikes in most of the time is coverage in broadcasters, press, incumbent media organizations. We've also seen in the Reuters report that Martin referenced that there is an enduring gatekeeping trust amongst news consumers, perhaps even intensifying in traditional or recognized news media brands. Again, that's partly to do with the rise in information noise and the fact that people look to the likes of CNN or the BBC as flags, if you like, or symbolic of real news. And we can see that even in the patent applications for Google's news algorithm, it actually explicitly references organizations like CNN and the BBC as being authoritative, reliable news sources, more so than perhaps local or more alternative providers. We saw it also in the revelations in Gizmodu last month about the manual editing of Facebook's trending topics, whereby there were explicit, according to the whistleblowers at least, there were explicit instructions from Facebook management to ensure that stories that were being covered prominently by incumbent mainstream media platforms like the BBC, like the CNN, should be boosted on Facebook's trending topics if they were not surfacing organically. So we still live in an age, in spite of the cocooning of personal agendas, which is a real problem, and I agree with Martin entirely with that, we still live in an age where there is such a thing as an aggregate news agenda, and that aggregate news agenda is still dominated by a small number of very powerful voices. So to conclude, the question of how to regulate concentrated news media power in a digital environment has been much debated for some time, but debates have reached an impasse. Policymakers must recognize that the problem exists, first of all, and that it requires attention to both old and new forms of bottlenecks and information gatekeeping. Above all, it requires the challenge, the courage, to challenge information gatekeepers in an area where vulnerability to capture and corporate lobbying influence is still as acute as it ever was. Thank you. Hello. Again, thanks for being invited, and thanks for the sandwiches too. I appreciate that. Thank you all for being here. I want to start off by talking about freedom of speech. Often when we talk about freedom of speech or we talk about information to use the title of this panel, we're thinking about knowledge, we're thinking about access, we're talking about whether people should be able to obtain these things. But freedom of speech to me means the difficulties of creation. As Jane Ginsburg, a professor of law at Columbia University said, poverty is a form of censorship. This is why authors always talk about money. When George Bernard Shaw was negotiating with Samuel Goldwyn over the movie adaptation of one of his plays at a very difficult negotiation, and Shaw finally wrote to Goldwyn and said, it appears, sir, that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in money. This is the reality that we live with as creators. And in fact, the difficulties of paying for creation depends upon the enormous variety of creation. Often when we talk about books, for example, we talk about them as if they are simply one product. Each book is a unique product. Now, I have colleagues whose work I respect who've put out books after six weeks of effort. I've never written a book with less than four years of full-time work. So obviously, the cost of creation is what's important. And creation is essential to our democracy and to our culture. That's why Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, before we get to the Bill of Rights, before we get to freedom of speech, the first freedom of speech element of the Constitution is in joining Congress to establish copyright. Copyright is an intervention in the market by the government to create a market for intellectual property. It does not exist on its own. Just ask Dickens about how he felt about the natural market for his intellectual property before the U.S. started to protect foreign copyright. So in talking about this in terms of the monopoly problem, we have to remember how we began previously and how it's changed. Now, creators are individual disaggregated, they're disaggregated individuals operating in a corporate marketplace. Traditionally, we've worked with companies that have invested in creation. A publisher is not my employer, it is my business partner. I'm at a disadvantage in that negotiation. We don't always have the same interests. But we negotiate terms, they invest money in my creation, and they are my partner in the marketplace. So therefore, their economic interests are aligned to a certain extent, an important extent, with creation. Excuse me. And when it comes to this creation, when we think about what the publisher does, in addition to investing, they go out and they establish the price, and then they deal with retailers. Now, as Matoka Rich wrote in The New York Times in 2010, the cost of the medium of that creation, the physical book, printing, distribution, warehousing returns actually takes up a very small percentage of the traditional hardcover book. I think of a $26 hardcover, she's found that about $3.25 was taken up by the physical medium in all that aspect. The list price is then determined not according to the price of the medium, not by the page count, but by the cost of creation, both invested by the publisher and also the royalties that go to the author, balanced against the estimated total sales that that book will have. The retailers then can discount cutting into their own margin in order to gain a market advantage. Now, however, what we see is an assault on the value of our creative work, especially in digital form, by entities that invest nothing in creation. Now, these companies have argued falsely that the physical medium, in fact, represents most of the cost of creative work. We see this in the case of Amazon, which I'll talk about in a minute, but also we have to pay attention to players that are not as big in the book market as it now stands, Google, Facebook, Twitter. These companies make money purely from distribution. They have separated out and removed from themselves the cost of the supply of creative work, and they have taken onto themselves almost all of the rewards of demand. So they have separated out the cost of supply from the rewards of demand, and they've taken it upon themselves because they make most of their money from advertising, most of which does not go to creators. Now, Amazon dominates bookselling, and the various repercussions are important for that. I know that New America has dealt with this extensively before. We have to remember that Amazon is not a bookseller. When a product or a category of products, I should say, represents a single digit percentage of your total business, then it does not define your business. Amazon's bookselling represents perhaps 5 percent, certainly a single digit percentage of its business, and yet it vastly dominates the bookselling business. So when publishers, as well as individual authors, when they're being self-published, when they negotiate with Amazon, they're negotiating with an entity that could completely kill off their industry and would be just fine. That is not a balanced market, and it has to be treated not as two equal players, the publisher and the retailer, but as a new kind of monopolist entirely. And we have to remember that the way they've structured book pricing is not because it's cheaper, for example, to produce an ebook. When they introduced the $9.99 price as a ceiling for ebooks, it had nothing to do with supply and demand. It had nothing to do with the market. Rather, what they were doing is instituting a corporate strategy in order to drive people, not only into ebooks, but into the Kindle, which drives them into its closed digital e-tail ecosystem, so that then they go out and buy TVs and couches and whatever else it is that where they actually have a margin and make a profit. In other words, it's not just that books are a lost leader, it's that they are a way of trapping consumers within this digital e-tail system. Then, of course, they don't want to lose so much money on books, so they establishing that $9.99 price and below, then they turned around and once they created price expectations for consumers who firmly believe that books are almost free to produce because there's no paper, now they turn around and use that against publishers and say, you have to drop your prices. And so when the Justice Department stepped in, Antitrust stepped in and used price as the sole justification for their antitrust suit, what they were doing is they were defending Amazon's corporate strategy at the expense of creation, which is where we begin. We begin with trying to promote the production of knowledge and art. That's what copyright is about. And when you put creators in an existential crisis and remember by dropping down prices, royalties are a percentage of prices, of list price. And so you're squeezing down the individual creator. My books cannot be outsourced to a factory in China. They cannot be automated, at least not yet. And so what happens is that you are going to get fewer books from me, okay? You get more of what you pay for. If you pay musicians to sell t-shirts and go on tour, they're not going to write more music. They're going to sell t-shirts and go on tour. So in other words, this whole structure of pricing that was created for a specific corporate strategy is driving down the price of creative work which drives down the returns and the amount of time, which is the primary investment that authors make in their creation. You get less creation. Now, one of the promises that was made is that sharply lower e-book prices would massively increase book sales. And of course, that has not happened. As we've seen, the total sales of books in America has remained basically flat for the last couple of decades. Now, actually, considering the competition from digital media, that's wonderful. I would love growth, but at least hanging on as a medium that Americans consume is wonderful. What hasn't happened is a massive increase in the number of books sold. Certainly, my books, which have never hit the New York Times bestseller list, are not rising up. Rather, what I've seen is that e-book sales have cut into, they've cannibalized, print book sales. Now, I don't care how readers read my work. I make use of digital technology like anyone else. And yet, the returns have to be such to make it possible for me to create more or you won't see more books from me, which is actually fine with some people. Now, another aspect of this downward pressure on creation is that it actually forecloses innovation. This is very important. Actually, a lot of the digital ideologues who are making these arguments about how information should be free or books are almost free in digital form because you don't have printing, what they're forgetting is they're looking at the market as it exists now. And this was true actually in the Supreme Court's mistaken decision not to overturn the Google e-book program is that they're saying, oh, well, this doesn't hurt the existing book market. However, book authors as well as other creators want to create in new ways. And because of the downward pressure on e-books in digital form, we cannot create new kinds of books that actually require greater investment and thus would have a greater price for the consumer. An example of this is my current book, excuse me, Custer's Trials. I wanted to produce a very expansive digital version of that book with multi-layered digital enhancements from interactive maps, from music being embedded in it and photographs and digressions, ways to connect intertextually to my other books in digital form. And yet, my publisher was very clear, they said there is no market for a book that is more expensive than the hardcover would be. And it would have to be more expensive. It would have taken more effort on my part, as well as the participation of collaborators. And so what we see is that by focusing entirely upon price in looking at the digital monopolist in looking at their strategies and by saying, well, is it cheaper? That is the only thing that matters. What we are seeing is that the use of their monopoly power to drive down the value of creative work in digital form is actually cutting off new kinds of creation because it is limiting the return that we can get for investing in that creative work. And people think that we write because we love it. It is true. But, unfortunately, my utility does not sell me electricity because they love making electricity. The grocery store does not sell me, give me food because they love providing food. Now, when we look at authors and other creators as disaggregated individuals, like I said, we already have a problem in negotiating with publishers. And when we look at groups like Amazon, what we see is that Amazon wishes to further disaggregate us. They hate publishers because publishers actually have some, very limited, but some, market power in their negotiations. And what they would like is to drive everybody into self-publishing and publish directly from Amazon. And so, again, we have to acknowledge Amazon has been very good and consumer relations with their order fulfillment, with their ease of ordering. It is not as if this is a company that has not provided value. And yet, what they have done is embarked upon a deliberate corporate strategy in order to take both the supply side and also the price at the end for the consumer and promote their own corporate advantage, not simply operating as disinterested intermediaries in the marketplace. So by trying to get authors to sign up directly with Amazon, you have heard some of the negative effects of this in the way they disadvantage people who are published by traditional publishers, the way they disadvantage some authors against others. But one effect of that is that it disadvantages authors like myself who require investment in creation. The ideal Amazon self-published author is someone who turns out a book quickly and cheaply. They require no advance, even those who are published in a semi-traditional form by Amazon and not simply as self-published authors. They get little or no advance, and there's very little investment by Amazon into those works. And so their ideal writer is someone who's writing a real quick, straightforward thriller. And again, there's wonderful thrillers. I'm not running down thrillers or romances or mysteries, but the kind of books that can be quickly churned out often in genre form, books like, say, Jane Meyers' book on dark money or on torture and other things, books that really provide valuable information, books that provide art, Robert Caro's fabulous biographies, works in a category that I hope mine belong to, that provide art and enrich our culture in other ways in addition to the knowledge they provide. These books require investment. And so what we see by the attempt to further disaggregate us through their dominance of the market is that they're actually discriminating not only against some publishers and some authors, but against whole categories of books. And again, that goes against the entire purpose of copyright, the entire purpose of the role of government in the intellectual property marketplace, which is to encourage more. And so in short, I'm not sure exactly what the solution is. We need to maintain healthy markets, but markets that work for the individual creator. We have to make sure that we don't put price before all other considerations. Because when the price is the only consideration, then the weight of that is felt by the creators, and that is one of the direct effects of the monopolization that's resulted in the digital medium. Thank you. Good afternoon. First of all, I'd like to thank Barry and New America for having me come through. I'd also like to thank the other speakers, and particularly TJ, because I'm going to kind of, we're covering a lot of the same territory here, because we have a lot of the same issues. Music was actually the first creative industry to be affected by the internet. I think a more correct word would be devastated by the internet. I've been looking for the figures in 2000. The U.S. music industry made over $13 billion. 2015, it was around seven. So we're looking at a drastic shrinkage of our industry. Back in the early days of Napster, a lot of artists pushed back against digital industry. People like Metallica and my friend Verna Reed from the band Living Color, and a lot of people took a lot of fire for that. So a lot of musicians kind of fell back and said, you know, let's kind of see what happens to see if we can make this work. Myself personally, I was more in the fallback category. But as time went on, I realized that I actually needed to understand what tech looked like and what tech business looked like so I could integrate myself into it. So around the days of the beginning of Twitter, I actually started doing some research into what a working digital business looks like. And one of the things, what I found out a few interesting things, I found out that the goal of a digital business is to scale, is to get as large as possible. And the best way to scale, I also found out the best way to scale is to aggregate, which is to take a lot of things and put them together in one place. And I further found out, and this is information you can get if you go to Barnes & Noble or Amazon and just buy any book on what digital business model is supposed to look like. This is not like secret information. The goal of a digital business, if it works properly, is to become a monopoly. It is to become one of one or two players in whatever area it's doing business in. So when I looked at that, I was kind of like, okay, this is a problem here. What does this mean? So at that point, I started looking at, well, how does the United States handle monopolies in this day and age? And the example that I had back in 2008 was Walmart. And looking at how America handled Walmart, I got very afraid. I realized that as a creator, I was facing a systemic and existential problem. How was I going to survive as a creator and my friends survive when these aggregation business models scale? What are we going to do? Well, it's been eight years and now we know. We know, as a musician, I know that Google YouTube sets the price for my music. They control when it gets out. I cannot prevent anyone from accessing my music in a way that works for me as a business anymore. That's just the reality of what it is. They control the flow of information. There are many people who literally do not know what their contract on YouTube looks like. As I said earlier, they set the terms and conditions of when we operate. And as I said earlier, we're unable to negotiate properly because of this asymmetrical information flow. As TJ alluded in the context of Amazon, it's the same problem in Google. Google is not actually in the music business. They are in the ad and data business. So the cost of producing music is not something they have to worry about. It's something that I very much have to worry about because not only do I have to pay for my music, I have to pay for my musicians, and I have to pay to eat and live. So as a group of creative artists, what has happened because is that musicians and creators in general have realized that they have to do what these companies are doing, which is they have to aggregate. They have to get together and they have to start speaking up. And the organization that I'm president of Content Creators Coalition is one of the organizations that's attempting to do. That is not just attempting to do. It has done that in the digital domain. As I was saying about the YouTube music business model and tech business models in general, as creators, our creativity has become subsidiary to what feeds and supports tech. Instead of doing what's best for us as creators and using the business models that we know work, that our fans also appreciate, we have to work on the business models that are detrimental to what works for our fans. The New York Philharmonic should not be competing with Justin Bieber, but they're both on YouTube and Justin Bieber makes drastically more money than they do because Justin Bieber has drastically more views. Whereas the Philharmonic's fan base is a much different fan base and would support the Philharmonic in a much different way. But because we are looking at a business model that is working to aggregate and not make aggregate to make profit for people who are shareholders and not supporters of music we're facing this. I'd like to say that that leads into the issue of community. One very important thing, I'm from New York City and we have our own form of music that we gave to the world hip hop. And in New York you can literally name the blocks where certain things happened. I've had situations where I have friends who come to New York and they want me to take them certain places because that's where they know certain things happen. When you have a monopoly that's going to go away because the community is no longer in charge of how music is created. It can no longer be included in the process of supporting music. Let's go back to 70s or early 80s. A bunch of guys throw a party. People from the neighborhood come out. Some of them tell their friends, somebody in the neighborhood might film it, stuff goes around and the community knows what's going on and it gets big. In this day and age people will stream it on Periscope and that will be the end of it. Whatever value that happened in that process, that value will not go back to the community. That value will go somewhere to the people of Palo Alto. If this is the case you're not going to see movements like hip hop happen again. You're not going to see movements like punk rock happen again. You're not going to see any of this because it's impossible to support. I'll give you one example that made it very clear for me. Back in the 90s I went to India on a trip and I was driving through different towns and we went to one town in particular and I had to get in and out of that town quickly. One of my habits was I always bought the music in each town I was in. In this particular town I was unable to buy the music because we had to keep it moving. I got to the next town and I said, let's go to the market because I want to buy some music from the such and such. You can't get that here. I said, why? I said, you can only get that music in that town. On one hand you say to yourself, well in the international regime, okay everything's up on Spotify, I can hear the music. But on the other hand, the people of that town make sure that their musicians are supported. That money stays in their town, they make the cassettes, whatever, all of that money circulates through their system. Now all of that money goes to Stockholm. So what happens to the scene there? The scene falls apart. So for us as a group, Content Creators Coalition, we think in terms of community and we think in terms of individual autonomy. The biggest problem for us as creators is that we simply cannot say no. We cannot say and we can't even say yes properly. We can't even say yes, put my music up Tuesday. They'll say, no, we have contracts. You have a commons or durations and they keep it up from such and such a date till such and such a date, you can only do it here and in the ways we decide. So it winds up to be that as creators, it's literally an impossibility to do things in a way that works to sustain a career. So I mean, it's kind of tough to end it on such a harsh note, but I mean, looking forward I would say for the people in this room to start thinking in terms of looking at how you can create your own community and look in terms of what sort of things within this so-called aggregation model can give power back to individual creators, whether it's a situation of getting creators on boards of some of these organizations or whatever it is that allows other voices to be heard that can have a different sort of response. Thank you very much. Well, thanks to all the panelists. This was great. There's so much to talk about. We have very little time. I want to just throw out a couple of questions to get us started and then open it up to you all. When you look at sort of monopolies in fields that have been around for a long time like retail or airlines, right? The stores aren't that different than they were 50 years ago. Airplanes aren't that different than they were 50 years ago. Media information platforms, they didn't even exist 10 years ago really. One of you, I can't remember, it was either Justin or Martin wrote in none other papers, that it took 60 years for the electricity to go to be invented as a consumer product and for 40 percent of Americans to have electricity coming in their homes. It took about five years from the start of Facebook to get 40 percent. So this is happening really, really fast and it's very, very different. And I think for most Americans, it's hard to know what they're dealing with. And where the harm is, right? We know like, well, when railroads stop a flow of goods into a city, that's bad for the city or when they charge big farmers more money, less money to ship their goods than small farmers and it's bad for small farmers. But I don't think we quite, I think the public doesn't understand this and doesn't understand where the harm is, right? Where the harm is to them, where the harm is to the country. So Justin, I'll just start this question with you. Can you boil down for the average person where the harm is to their lives, to their markets, to their well-being in just one of these platforms? Sure. Well, I'll give it a stab. I mean, I think one of the things that really kind of unites all of the panel really is the concern about content creation and what is happening to content creation as a result of the rise of the Silicon Valley giants. So I think from the consumer or the user or the citizen's perspective, we have to really ask the question, and I think Melvin put it very succinctly, of what's going to be missing? What is missing? What are we going to start getting less of as a result of these changes, whether that's certain types of music, certain types of books or certain types of journalism? But I think the trap that we shouldn't fall into is almost like a kind of reworked version of the Too Big to Fail argument that is the job of policymakers to support certain types of industries or certain types of companies. What is the job of policymakers to do in this context is to support certain types of content that are beneficial to democracy, that promote diversity, that promote a more informed electorate, etc. So just from the perspective of news, one of the solutions that we are advocating or that I advocated in the essay I wrote for Res Publica and I have done through media form coalition in my new book is that there should be a simple transfer or cross-subsidy of funds from search and social network operators who make huge profits largely off the back of advertisers that once funded forms of journalism in the public interest. And the way to do that is not by just enforcing traditional forms of copyright, albeit in new guises like the ancillary copyright laws that have been attempted in certain countries in Europe and failed disability, because that just goes into the pockets of traditional news organizations with no guarantees that the money will be used to support those forms of journalism that are under pressure in the new environment. And it's worth emphasising that the decline in local journalism and investigative journalism in particular actually predates the digital era. Although the digitalisation has been a catalyst and has exacerbated the problem, it's not solely to do with it, it's also to do with the commercialisation of news industries in general. So a targeted cross-subsidy raised by a simple nominal levy on the revenues of the likes of Google, Facebook, dominant monopoly players and targeted towards supporting those forms of journalism whose sustainability is really threatened and who really make a contribution to democratic life. And it's worth also saying that in this country which is relatively more positive than we have in the UK and Europe, there is a tradition of third sector, if you like, organisations supporting these forms of journalism, pro-publica, centre for public integrity, et cetera, that is well established. But that does not solve the problem in and of itself and we need to find ways to ensure that that news is not only produced but actually finds an audience, a critical mass audience and informs public debate. So there is an actual solution, folks, something we can begin to do. One of the interesting things about this particular area is how little we know about what's happening inside the black box of these, right? And Melvin had to do his own research just to figure out what their business models are but one of you used the term asymmetry of information. We don't know how the algorithms work, right? So my brother has a co-owner of a reggae bar in Chicago and he does, he pulled all his advertising out of the alternative newspaper and puts it all into Facebook, right? So he's got 10,000 Facebook likes, people who liked his bar and he pays them $1,000 a month to push out Facebook advertising but it doesn't get to those 10,000. It gets to some small percentage of those 10,000. It would be a lot smaller if he didn't pay him $1,000 a month but he doesn't know which of the 10,000, right? He doesn't even know the percentage. How much do we need before we can come up with solutions? Do we need to have the information to divide the solutions? And I'll put that to all of you. And I just jump in on one of those because I mean I talked a little bit about filter bubbles and filter bubbles which is essentially meaning that whether we're within our Facebook feed, within our Twitter feed, within our that we are only exposed to opinions and perspectives that we agree with essentially or mainly. And this is suddenly for the reasons I said it become an incredibly important issue in the UK when people suddenly genuinely recognize they don't understand one another. They're not seeing outside their own bubble, their own community, their own like-minded. Now people try to do research on this to understand whether there is a Facebook, whether there's a Facebook effect, whether there's... We can't, we can't particularly we can't with Facebook because it's opaque. Facebook commissioned its own research about a year ago which which claimed that actually it wasn't so bad, there was a filter bubble, it wasn't so bad. And it was then roundly criticized by a lot of people for the sampling for the way in which it was done etc. But but equally they couldn't redo it and neither can I and neither can anyone. So we have on the one hand we have what clearly seems to most of us in the outside like a really significant civic and political problem but a problem that we can't even understand and assess because we haven't got access to the data. Yeah I just will ask kind of a leading question because I wanted that answer and and we have a story in the current issue of the Washington Monthly about the way business gets done in this town and it's in its asymmetries of information right? The lawmakers and the regulators have to write laws and regulations based on other people's data right? The industries that are being regulated are the ones that have proprietary data and they're only going to show you the public and their representatives the cherry-picked part of that data. And this goes back years right? We remember the story that came out about a year ago that Exxon Mobile knew that their products were causing global warming in the 70s and they didn't let that out instead they hired you know various PR agencies and faux researchers to say no it's not a problem. So so this is just this is endemic and I guess I'm the leading question is what would you like to know in your sphere TJ say about how Amazon runs its business and structures the market for your books that would that would empower you to know what the right thing to do is? Well this is I'm just this question raises other issues that are kind of beyond the scope of what we're talking about which is you know that in a fast-moving marketplace and you know we're talking about very serious problems of monopoly power and I use that term loosely I know there's a legal definition that but still you know you've seen how quickly things have changed and so we need clearly need regulation and yet it needs to be far more nimble than it is now. I mean rulemaking processes as well as political deadlock just make it so difficult to quickly adapt regulatory rules and you know sometimes you'll get it wrong you've got to you've got to be able to move quickly but it's got to start with transparency and you know that's what makes market works markets work the the most important thing is transparency and Amazon is a complete black box. Google Facebook they're black boxes you just don't know what's going on and so I think that you know we should have a rule that edit when you get a certain market share that you are subject to if not everyone then at least the extremely large dominant players should be subject to a revelation about their the state of the markets the information they're collecting how their pricing where their revenue is coming from etc and you know we need to know because we can't even make the rules even if we had an ideal rulemaking process and we had no political deadlock we wouldn't know exactly where to start I mean I know the results I would like but I don't know the means of getting there because we don't have that information. Melvin you as pointed out that it was the music industry that got hit first my industry the news industry got hit pretty much the same time but you guys were first what from your perspective having lived through this can the rest of us in the in the publishing in the news in the books in the other creative arts and I would throw in maybe the craft industry too because it's got Etsy right which is both enabling and and disenabling the capacity of individual artists and craftsmen to sell their wares what do you you look you end it on a little bit of a dark note are things gonna get worse or are they gonna get better things are going to change worse or better time will tell I think you have this is the you have a conundrum because you have two things that are in sort of basic conflict when you're trying and when you're aggregating and the aggregation model is to get as many people together for the smallest possible price you cannot have you cannot fit I'm trying to figure out you know you cannot fit something that is only worth something to 10,000 people into that you know so you're only gonna have certain kinds of music you're only gonna have certain kinds of books so it's up to the people to decide really what they want and it's up to people to decide I'm gonna kind of change something because there's something that stuck with me I heard the word subsidy earlier in America when you say the word subsidy people kind of like why would we do a subsidy I think that people I'd like to use the term reverse socialism I think that you have to remember when when you're getting a low price at Walmart you're paying for somebody you're paying that for that in in snap money that's coming out of your taxes when you're when they're getting music for thousands of a penny you're paying for that the people who are they're paying for that in Kickstarter you're paying that for that at higher costs all the way around you have people have to kind of open up their minds a little to see how this thing works as a system and decide how they want to intervene I mean people should support the arts the way they want to support them and there's nothing wrong with Etsy or Kickstarter or any of these things but I think that to the extent that people can intervene as individuals and go from individual to individual go to the artist's website go to the publishing company's website as opposed to going to an aggregated I think that's a place to start yeah I just want to say quickly I know we don't have much time but it's important you know Melvin makes just such an important point and it's something I mentioned too is that you know by having whether it's Amazon's one price fits all policy or the uh it's free aggregation model what they're doing is they're destroying markets because you do not have the same market for a Justin Bieber song as you do for performance by the New York Philharmonic they are different marketplaces you have the like I said with with book pricing traditionally you know you have the cost of production the margin the publisher would like to make the the author's um royalty is a part of that and then you have the projected universe that the supply um is the author's effort how hard it is and how long it takes to produce that book it's not how many books you produce and so that's a specific market the audience for that book the audience for this other book is a different market and so the one of the results of these monopolization in the digital realm is destroying markets and and creating trying to create one giant marketplace that simply does not work and for large uh elements of of that marketplace and so you know this is something there's there's educational process like Melvin saying like getting the the public to really understand and participate and realize that you know well how much does it cost me cannot be the only question but there has got to be a role like I said intellectual property only has a market because the government created one that's where we start and so the role of government is absolutely essential to maintain those various marketplaces um I promised we'd open it up to the uh to the uh uh folks but we're not going to be able to do that we've got to move on to the next thing so so um uh thank you uh to the panel a round of applause for these guys they were great