Publishers' call: 'Government takes action against the imbalance created by Big Tech'

The alarm is clear: publishing, the constitutional guardian of the right to information, is today crushed by a digital market in which competition is no longer on an equal footing. The Italian information industry - newspapers, periodicals, radio, TV and books - is united in front and asks the government for an urgent response. And it does so with a joint communiqué that bears the 'signature' of Fieg (the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers), Aie (the Italian Publishers Association) and Confindustria Radio Televisioni. The publishers recall that their task is not only industrial: 'We are guarantors of pluralism, producers of knowledge, actors in civil debate. A role recognised by the Constitution, but today put in crisis by the pervasive force of Big tech, capable of altering the balance and rules of the game,' they write.

The sector defines the situation as a true emergency and calls on the government and parliament to intervene immediately to rebalance the market. The objective is clear: to guarantee an economic, social and cultural future for the Italian publishing enterprise, considered an essential guardian of democracy and freedom of information. Publishers propose an organic package, not episodic interventions; an industrial policy, not buffer measures.

The mechanism is well known, but in the press release it takes on a definitive clarity: digital platforms aggregate and monetise content produced by publishers by recognising only crumbs of copyright. They offer free services that compete with original sources, drain advertising revenue and retain the largest share of revenues through user data.

The effect is a structural weakening of the economic sustainability of publishing companies, which are forced to bear the costs of original production without having access to the same monetisation capacity. A vicious circle that regulation is slow to break.

The heart of the problem is also technological. Big Tech's non-transparent algorithms decide the visibility of content and condition citizens' access to information. Publishers, although legally responsible for what they publish, are in fact subordinated to logics they do not control.