On Thursday, June 27^th we hosted with The Guardian US one of our very best discussion events focused on solutions for "Fixing the Information Crisis Before It’s Too Late (for Democracy).”

For this event, we asked all of our speakers to come prepared to share solutions. 

This is because we already know the problems all too well: tech platforms manipulating and censoring information; corporations taking the work of journalists and publishers without compensation; and digital advertising middlemen standing between news publishers and needed revenues.  

Government officials who oversee the markets relevant to these discussions, such as U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Katherine Tai, FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter, and European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, members of the U.S. Congress, as well as publishers and editors from major newspapers, and competition policy experts from the U.S. and Europe all shared solutions that would shift the power dynamics over who controls and governs our information environment. Here are a few of the solutions they named:

• Improve competition in tech so that tech giants have less power over online advertising, data, cloud, AI, and more.
• Create structural separation between digital advertisers/adtech and the major platforms that currently dominate online advertising.
• Impose greater liability for technologies that promote harmful content, scrape content from journalists and creators without compensation, and self-preference their own content or sites over others.
• Impose common carrier and non-discrimination rules on dominant digital platforms
• Establish fair compensation frameworks for news publishers and fairer means for publishers to bargain over the value of their content. 
• Institute “Must carry, must pay” for news.
• Require licensing and copyright protections for news and other content used in AI
• Demand greater transparency and resiliency from cloud companies. Declare the cloud an essential utility.
• Ensure regulation and investment do no entrench the same big players
• Create tougher policies for regulating data flows and who owns and benefits from our personal data

All of these solutions would move us toward an information environment that prioritizes reliable information, such as from trusted news organizations, and prevents companies from pushing harmful content on the public in order to pull in greater and greater profits from advertising. It would create a digital commons in which truthful information is widely shared and debated. It would prevent the kind of concentration over cloud computing that makes our economy vulnerable. It would strengthen democracy and help starve fascist, far-right movements of the hate and disinformation they thrive on. These solutions all help shift the power over the internet from giant corporations that have failed to protect our democracies back to the people, where it belongs. 

Best of all, in most cases, we already have laws on the books we can use, which means our law enforcers can begin today to fix these problems.