The Future of News (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Gilbert of Panteg Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gilbert of Panteg (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Stowell both on introducing this excellent report and on her very successful tenure as chair of the Communications and Digital Committee. Under her leadership, the committee has produced several significant reports on the creative industries, the media, and digital technologies and their regulation. I declare a former interest in that I professionally advised Daily Mail and General Trust—a role that ceased last year.

It was a privilege to precede my noble friend as chair of this committee. In reading this report, I was struck by some consistent themes of its work over the past decade. The committee is right to worry about how our news media will survive, let alone thrive, in a polarised world where we have allowed a small number of platforms to be dominant and to develop addictive, monopolistic business models. However, the report is also right to be cautious in its recommendations; in particular, it is right to be hesitant about the role of government and the extent to which it can intervene in the industry.

I want to focus on just two areas: first, platform dominance and product design; and, secondly, the related issues of our polarised society and trust in the media and institutions. It is clear that our news media organisations have faced powerful headwinds and have struggled to adapt to change. In many ways, the Conservative in me would say, “Well, what’s the problem? If an industry is out-innovated and better products emerge, and businesses fail to adapt, then they will die and something better will take their place”. However, that is not what is happening, because, for free markets to work, we must be sure that dominant players do not abuse their position and stifle competition, whether that is through the behaviour of a small number of platforms gatekeeping access to the internet, which keeps news organisation from building direct relationships with their readers; through opaque, changing algorithms that leave publishers unable to see how their content has been ranked and served; through lack of a complaints process, which leaves small and local publishers in particular unable to seek redress if they think their content has been unfairly treated; or through Google’s dominance of online advertising on both the supply and demand sides, which we have allowed to happen and which is at last being called out in the United States, where, in a landmark judgment, Google was found to have

“engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly”.

Now, it is in the debate about AI and copyright law, where, again, we are failing to address the issue of dominance. What is happening in reality, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, pointed out, is that AI summaries head search results. They are based on content scraped—some might say stolen—from copyrighted material. Creators—in this case, professional journalists and news publishers—are neither remunerated nor even credited on the face of the summary. The creator does not get any credit or reward for their effort and investment. How can content creators possibly survive this? Can the Minister give an example of any other industry where this kind of exploitation is lawful?

However, it is not the fault of Google, Meta or any of the other big tech companies that these issues have not been addressed; it is our fault. Where we should have been focused on how these huge businesses stifled competition and created dominant business models and addictive products, we were focused on content and speech and how to regulate them. That is not, and never will be, the answer. We must focus now on dominance and design; the report is right to call for competition to be taken seriously. I hope that remedies such as interoperability, which was a key feature of liberating telecoms, and open banking, which has allowed new entrants to challenge in markets that were dominated, can be part of the set of interventions in this dominated market.

It is by tackling design and dominance that we will address the online harms we worry about. Tackling addictive products and abusive algorithms, with a real, muscular focus on digital literacy, will do a great deal more to deal with online harms than content regulation, kitemarking, ranking or trying to regulate speech.

One of the harms about which we worry most is increasing polarisation and intolerance, leading to online abuse. Polarised debate; accusing those we disagree with of peddling fake news or spreading misinformation; highlighting only differences while not acknowledging that, often, we seek the same ends and differ on only the means; wrongly labelling our opponents as extreme and delegitimising them; and calling out people with whom we disagree as, for example, far right—these are all behaviours that have contributed to polarisation and a breakdown in trust for which we cannot entirely blame the media. Indeed, a thriving and diverse news media, as well as free and vigorous but respectful debate, with a media literacy approach that skills young people to be sceptical and inquiring rather than cynical and untrusting, is the way forward and something for which we all have a responsibility.