Digital Monopolies—The Extent of Monopolization in Germany and the Implications for Media Freedom and Democracy

Abstract

A holistic scientific measurement of the internet traffic across all devices in Germany has quantified the extreme extent of digital monopolization. Due to the high level of concentration, provider pluralism and fair competition in the field of digital media have been systematically and intentionally abolished. As a result of the digital transformation, it can be assumed that the GAFA (the known acronym for Google, i.e., Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, i.e., Meta, Apple) players will take control of the German media system in the coming years (due to comparable market structures, the situation will be similar in other Western democracies). From a German and a European perspective, it is the more alarming that this development can hardly be stopped on the basis of existing legislation. However, already the status quo is in striking contradiction to the anti-monopolistic principles of classic German media law. It is time for a fundamental debate and quick legislative actions to open the media markets again for competition and plurality and safeguard media freedom for the future.

1. Background: Digital Media Monopolies as a Threat to Media Freedom

Media monopolies and oligopolies are by nature a fundamental threat to the concept of media freedom (cf. Tambini 2021), as they undermine key concepts such as provider pluralism as well as independence. The market dominance of the tech corporations has been the subject of academic research and criticism in the past (cf. Moore and Tambini 2018). The subject is increasingly important due to the sheer dynamics of the digital transformation. For example, in Germany (the situation for Europe is quite similar), we have reason to assume that digital media finally overtook analog media in 2021—certainly speeded up by the digitalization push of the COVID-19 pandemic. But due to the dominance of the corona troubles in public discourse, this milestone was completely overshadowed at the time.

What data endpoints could be used to derive this turning point for the year 2021? A quite interesting indirect indicator for media dominance is delivered by the comparison of cumulative investments in online and offline advertising, since advertising expenditure monetizes the bundled attention that the entire media audience distributes across all the different media channels.

As we are talking about billions of Euros in ad spending, we can assume that advertising companies use highly granular analyses to place their advertising where they find the greatest intensity of audience usage. In Germany, more than 50% of total advertising investment had already been generated on digital channels since 2020 (Janke 2021, 2022). This corresponds well with scientific findings on usage behavior (Kupferschmitt and Müller 2023). In Europe, the share was already 57.8% in 2021 (Navarro 2025). Analog channels are falling behind, digital media have overtaken them, and we can assume that this is just the beginning of a tipping-point dynamic that will continue.

The fact that digital media will replace analog media in the future is a truism anyway. Thus, it is ultimately irrelevant how precise the above indirect indication is. The key point is that analog media continue to be eroded, whereas digital media are booming. Which also means that as a society, we are now approaching an era in which digital media are the leading media. Analog media will disappear more and more—it is not so much a question of whether this will happen, but how quickly it will become a reality.

For the subject matter of digital monopolization, however, it had been a key drawback in the past that there was no scientific quantification of the precise level of market dominance. This is deplorable insofar as digital media in particular can be studied quite well via the scientific monitoring (i.e., tracking) of real usage (which, in contrast, is methodologically impossible or at least quite difficult to achieve for analog media, such as TV, radio or newspaper). The absence of such studies is a significant issue for the task of media regulation. To take the example of Germany, regulators currently have only survey-based data at hand. For this reason, we have performed the first full measurement of real digital media usage in Germany. This paper delivers a review of our past findings as well as the implications of the ensuing debate on media regulation in order to make our insights available internationally.

2. Extreme Concentration in Digital Media: Media Monopolies

The entire digital media usage of the German population was measured on the basis of real usage across all devices (desktop, smartphone, tablet) in a representative panel of 16,000 people. The complete study and all measurements have been published in a comprehensive handbook publication, (background information on this empirical study is also available in English under https://www.atlasderdigitalenwelt.de/index_en.html, accessed on 1 April 2025). Accordingly, a comprehensive, complete and representative cross-sectional representation of the entire digital media usage is available (Andree and Thomsen 2020; the methodology is detailed on p. 261ff.). To our knowledge, this is so far the only existing scientific baseline measurement for an entire country. In contrast to common empirical surveys (ARD/ZDF 2023; SevenOneMedia 2024; InitiativeD21e.V. 2020), which are often based on users’ subjective assessments of their own usage behavior, only real media usage is measured and documented here.

Thanks to this holistic measurement of digital media usage, it is possible to quantify precisely the attention shares of the individual competitors on the basis of the entire aggregated duration of use (total duration). As we can see, a very large proportion of digital media usage takes place on the few offers of the tech giants, respectively, “GAFA”.

We immediately recognize that the general distribution of the German digital traffic is extremely concentrated. Accordingly, there is hardly any traffic beyond the major providers. This distribution rule even applies to the long tail, i.e., the large amount of smaller offers. A continuous measurement over 3 months was only able to identify usage on around 132,000 domains (see Figure 1). This number is sobering, because more than 16 million domains are registered in Germany (DENIC 2022). Even in such a powerful sample as used in our measurements, on more than 99% of the German domains which are registered (and paid for) by their operators, we could not identify any web traffic at all.

At the same time, we recognize that the ecosystems of Alphabet and Meta alone attract a third of all digital usage time. The four biggest players mentioned (GAFA) divide almost half of the entire digital media usage between them (see Figure 2). We can also measure that this concentration is currently much higher among the young population (14–29 years), which provides an indication of future developments: in this young target group, the four players mentioned already account for 56.7% of total usage time (by comparison: 45.8% in the overall German population).

For our analyses, 223 million impressions (i.e., website/app views) from the sample were evaluated over 3 months, which corresponds to a number of around 814 billion impressions in relation to the size of the German population. From the perspective of this holistic measurement, the consequences of the digital transformation on the German media system can be precisely illustrated.

Our current media world, which is still shaped by the presence of analog players, consists of many competing companies that are largely headquartered in Germany. In the future, the digital media world will be almost entirely in the hands of a few US corporations. This digital media universe will largely be characterized by monopolies and oligopolies. This is particularly visible when we look at specific media markets, such as search engines (88% share Alphabet: Google), social media (85% share Meta: Facebook/Instagram), or free video on demand (78% share Alphabet: YouTube). The future German media landscape will be controlled almost entirely from abroad (Hachmeister et al. 2022). Fair economic competition is largely abolished.

In common microeconomic theory as well as in the legal sense, we speak of a monopoly if there is only one single provider (cf. Nicholson 2004, p. 385). From a media usage perspective, however, we should also speak of monopolies when competitors no longer play a significant role and there is only one main provider for a channel—such as Google for search engines, WhatsApp for messengers, YouTube for free video on demand, Facebook/Instagram for social media and so on (Andree and Thomsen 2020). We also need to question whether the “old” notion of monopoly is still meaningful in today’s digital times. In prior centuries, monopolies were typically established by exclusive rights (such as the postal privilege) or excessive infrastructure costs (such as the railway system), explaining the complete absence of any competitors.

In the digital age, however, monopolies are typically established via network effects. Alternative offers may exist, even if from a perspective of usage share, they play no significant role. This is why it is advisable to adapt the notion of monopoly to digital realities, denominating a dominant player with a market share of more than 70% and only insignificant levels of competition.

On the basis of our holistic measurement of the digital traffic in Germany, we can now precisely assess the current degree of concentration by calculating the Gini coefficient as an indicator for digital dominance (cf. Andree and Thomsen 2020, p. 29ff.). As is generally known, the Gini coefficient is always placed between the values of 0 (equal distribution—all competitors are equally strong) and 1 (there is only one provider that attracts all existing traffic, while all »competitors« have zero traffic). The Gini coefficient for the distribution of the entire German digital traffic is 0.988 (Andree and Thomsen 2020, p. 29ff.). It is obvious that notions such as “open markets”, “free access” or “fair competition” do not apply any more under such a degree of digital monopolization. For the sake of completeness, it is important to note that this value of 0.988 was calculated “only” on the basis of the 131.993 different domains and offers that attracted any traffic whatsoever in the 3 months of measurements (i.e., without considering the remaining 15.9 million domains that did not show any traffic at all).

The methods of permanently occupying monopolies, for example, through network effects, closed standards, the reduction or “dimming” of outlinks, killer acquisitions, and the systematic exploitation of regulatory loopholes, have been well researched for years (Hindman 2018; Dolata 2015; Barnett 2018; Hagen 2018; etc.). Interestingly enough, the systematic and intentional approach to create monopolies is not even denied in the ecosystems of digital corporations, but rather openly proclaimed as a core element of “successful” entrepreneurial strategy (Thiel 2014; Seemann 2021).

The consequences of digital monopolization for our society are massive. The fact that a few digital corporations will take over our media system in the future should worry us already. This digital reorganization of our media system is destabilizing the foundations of our democracy. A first characteristic of this new media order is that journalistic content is only of microscopic importance and, in most cases, barely exists in the digital sphere. Again, our measurements can provide a specification of this insignificance.

To give an example, even a leading German publisher such as spiegel.de only achieves a usage time of 18 min among users—not per day, but per month (Andree and Thomsen 2020, p. 96f.). The example demonstrates that the publicly published, impressively high net reach values of many digital press publishers lead to inaccurate conclusions regarding market conditions—because the high net reach hardly provides these journalistic offerings with any relevant usage time.

The effects of the digital transformation on the digital offers of the German public service broadcasting are similarly massive. For the three-month period measured here, the video share of all public service broadcasting offers combined on their own domains was only 4% in the digital sphere (Andree and Thomsen 2020)—compared to 48% for television in the same time period (KEK 2020).

The pattern is similar to that of journalistic content. The public service offers achieve a quite high net reach—and typically these impressive values are also published. Thus, the misleading figures on reach and penetration lead to a strong overvaluation of the market position of such offerings for both scientific as well as public assessment. To put it bluntly, in these measurements or studies, they appear much larger than they actually are. It is important to note the implications: if the relevance and significance of journalistic online offerings are systematically overestimated by existing studies, this could also provide an explanation why the extent of the threat to media freedom in society created by digital monopolies is also systematically underestimated in the public debate. This is even more the case, as we can observe high satisficing effects in surveys, leading again to misleadingly high values of usage for classic media brands. Also, these survey-based studies are often used by political bodies and committees as a basis for regulation.

However, neither penetration nor reach are decisive for assessing the relative importance of online content. Only the aggregated duration of usage time delivers a robust indicator of relative significance. This KPI (key performance indicator) combines the reach (i.e., the number of unique users of a specific offering) with the precise time duration of each individual media usage (duration per unique user). Thus, only the aggregation in one value (total duration) provides both a robust and differentiated indication of how much time users actually spend on the specific offers via the various devices—and how large an offer is relative to its competitors.

Unfortunately, our measurements for journalistic content and digital public service broadcasting content show that these usage times are alarmingly low across the board (all offers are detailed in Andree and Thomsen 2020, p. 67ff.). If we also extrapolate these proportions into the future, the relative significance of public service broadcasting in Germany will implode, as these offers hardly have any relative significance in the digital sphere.

However, the greatest “success” of the tech giants, with the most dramatic consequences for our media freedom, will be to unhinge the foundations of our media law in the course of the digital transformation. Only this crucial component will make the takeover of the media system by the GAFAs irreversible. Of course, the assessment below is taking into consideration German media law, but we can assume that the situation will be very similar in most other Western democracies as the underlying democratic principles are comparable.

As a final remark, it should be noted that the data presented here were measured in the third and fourth quarter of the year 2019. Of course, it would be desirable to do an updated version (the absence of such holistic studies also shows the difficulty in executing such measurements). At the same time, the degree of concentration in such cross sections of markets remains quite stable over time. Thus, it can be assumed that even though the data are outdated, the general finding of extreme concentration would be quite similar if we undertook a similar measurement today.

3. Digital Monopolies Break with the Principles of Free, Independent Media

From the perspective of the interpretation of the above-mentioned usage data measurements, there are significant implications for the field of media law and regulation. As we will see, the digital monopolies break with core principles that have protected media freedom and independence for decades in Western democracies. Moreover, we are largely powerless against a future takeover of our media system by digital corporations on the basis of current legislation. The following sections are designed as a research impulse that will certainly require further detailed study by legal experts.

The following argument will be based on a review of the legal situation in Germany, but assuming that the outcome would be similar for most other Western countries. This is the case, as the underlying principles of free, independent media are typically identical. Key normative ideas are the following:

• The media should not be controlled by the state or other agents of power, such as religious groups or private powers.
• There should be absence of constraint (such as censorship) from the state. As well, dependencies or conflicts of interest between the media and the state should be avoided.
• The media sphere must be pluralistic, meaning that not one monopolist or few oligopolistic providers should control important media genres that are perceived to be essential for the formation of political opinions in democracy (i.e., television).
• Legislation highlights the importance of journalism and professional editorial media.

In the following exemplary analysis of the German legislation protecting media freedom, we will see that the status quo of digital monopolies violates all these basic principles. Even more disturbing is the fact that current legislation does not provide frameworks or provisions that would allow us to restore media freedom. We can assume that even if the specific rules and regulations differ by country, the outcome would be similar. Thus, the following analysis can also be used as a blueprint to exercise the same examination for other Western democracies.

In Germany, the issue of monopoly formation is a matter for general competition law. We would first consider antitrust law—a term that already indicates the inadequacy of existing legislation. In classic antitrust approaches, it is possible to take defensive legal action against mergers, cartels or trusts, and violators would have to face severe penalties. By contrast, monopolies which develop organically (such as Google’s search engine) are legitimate once established in the marketplace and can hardly be legally challenged on the grounds of legislation existing in Germany or the European Union.

If we now turn to classic German media law, we first notice that two specific perspectives of legislation coexist: the view on the media as infrastructure for the transmission of information is regulated by the “Telecommunications Act” (i.e., German “Telekommunikationsgesetz”, or “TKG”) in the area of individual communication, while the view on the mass dissemination and the content of the media is regulated primarily by the Interstate Media Agreement (German“Medienstaatsvertrag”, or “MStV”), which has replaced the former Interstate Broadcasting Agreement (German “Rundfunkstaatsvertrag”, or RStV). Both sets of norms are characterized by a strongly anti-monopolistic view.

Let us first consider the dimension of the medium as a channel—in other words, we are only concerned here with the aspect of transmitting information and data through infrastructures, completely independent of their content. The aim of the Telecommunications Act (TKG) is to promote competition and to prevent individual companies from having “significant market power” (Section 11)—according to a common rule of thumb, a market share of over 40% is considered critical (Fechner 2021, p. 388). For mass communication, the MStV contains regulations that govern access to key providers (e.g., “must-carry” regulations for platform operators and broadcasters). §§ 59, 60, 64 MStV formulate diversity of opinion as an interest to be safeguarded in broadcasting. Platform operators are not mentioned here.

In telecommunications, the degree of market dominance is determined by independent analyses of the Federal Network Agency (“Bundesnetzagentur”). If a market-dominating position is detected, the Federal Network Agency can take regulatory action at various levels. It can force companies to grant other competitors access to their own infrastructures and to establish interoperability. However, breaking up established monopolies is not provided for in the legislation.

Let us now turn to the side of mass communication and media content. This aspect is regulated by the Interstate Media Agreement (MStV). It stipulates (MStV § 60 MStV, formerly § 26 RStV) that no competitor should have a viewer share of more than 30% in a media channel. If specific thresholds are exceeded, the responsible state media authority can withdraw licenses for individual programs or even revoke the license of the company itself. Here, too, there are transparent methods for determining audience and attention shares and an independent authority for reviewing and assessing the respective market power is in charge (KEK, i.e., “KommissionzurErmittlung der KonzentrationimMedienbereich”, that is: the Commission assessing media concentration).

The KEK can express concerns about mergers between media providers and propose conditions to reduce a dominant influence on public opinion (Section 60, 4 MStV), but only in the area of content providers (again, this does not include platform regulation). For instance, broadcasters with a dominant influence on public opinion would not receive licenses for new programs, and the license for existing programs can be withdrawn in extreme cases. This applies only to broadcasting. Platforms are not broadcasting services and accordingly do not need to be licensed. If something does not need to be licensed, it cannot lose its license. Accordingly, the existing provisions and authorities do not have any legal instruments at hand to break up or restrain monopolies in the platform sector.

After having reviewed the legal norms in the area of analog media, we can now change perspective again and assess the digital situation. It is immediately apparent that under digital conditions, the threats to free and fair competition are massively increased by the fact that most of the digital monopolies of the GAFA offerings cover both the aspect of distribution channels and that of content. Thus, they are monopolists in two different aspects. They control both the content, but also the channel, that is, the distribution infrastructure (even if they are not telecommunications infrastructure operators in the classic understanding). This double control on infrastructure and content applies for all the known big offerings such as YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. The twofold dominance strengthens their market position even further. Only on rare occasions do we become aware of this double dependency on these platforms—for instance, if a Meta server goes down for a few hours and WhatsApp is no longer available.

Although the above-mentioned, anti-competitive dynamics of monopoly formation represent the most serious social problem of digital media (especially since it only intensifies all the other publicly discussed topics such as hate speech, fake news, data surveillance, etc.), both the German Telemedia Act (“Telemediengesetz”) as well as the Network Enforcement Act (“Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz”) fail to address the regulation of the monopolies. They deal primarily with information requirements and liability issues. In Germany, there are neither authorities nor common scientific measurements established to assess and control market power in the field of digital media.

Furthermore, it is highly questionable whether current new regulations even address the core of the problem. The new amendment to the GWB (“Gesetz gegen Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen”, i.e., Competition Act) only makes it easier for the authorities to take action against the abuse of monopolies, which is extremely difficult to prove because there is no access to data within the GAFAs’ walled gardens.

The situation is very similar with the European “Digital Markets Act” (DMA). According to the European Commission, its objective is to ensure “fair and open digital markets” in the future (European Commission 2020). Market-dominating gatekeepers are to be prevented from self-preferencing their own offerings (for example, the use of Android with simultaneous registration of a Gmail account). They would now be forced to open up cross-connections more to competition, for example, by opening up the app store and refraining from abusing their gatekeeper position, allowing third-party providers.

However, the problem of the already existing monopolies or oligopolies is not touched at all. The initiators of the DMA did not even have the courage to prohibit closed standards above a certain critical size, for example, which would consistently enforce general interoperability beyond the category of messengers.

Thus, the political objective of creating “fair and open digital markets” seems to be a somewhat bizarre phantasy in the light of the more than obvious reality of most digital markets in which fair competition has long been abolished by the existing monopolies or oligopolies. As the core of the problem is not addressed by the DMA, the status quo is only further cemented as a result of such legislation.

Existing case laws and regulatory tools are therefore insufficient in the field of digital monopolies (KEK 2022, p. 31). Legislation that aims to address the core problem would have to be much more fundamental. Monopolies would have to be a taboo in the media sector. In the markets where they exist, they would have to be abolished and competition restored.

From a legal point of view, it is hardly rational that the current leading digital media are not affected by precisely tailored regulations in these aspects, whereas the already collapsing analog media are systematically over-regulated across the entire vertical value chain and even in individual sub-segments.

The fundamental irrationality of our current legislation also becomes transparent if we do a simple extrapolation for the future development. We have documented above that the analog media are being continuously substituted by digital media. Within digital media usage, we have observed the extreme dominance of the platforms, whereas the digital offers of editorial media achieve hardly any visibility. The obvious question is: What will be the situation in the future—for instance, in a scenario where we will mainly have platforms and hardly any remaining editorial media or publishers? Will the framework that has guided German media regulation for decades not be relevant anymore? Will we suspend the constitutional requirement to warrant free media for our democracy?

In Germany, the new set of regulations by the EU (DMA/DSA) has now created even counter-productive side effects. As delineated above, the responsibility for media content is attributed clearly to the federal states in Germany and governed by the Interstate Media Agreement (MStV). This is particularly the case for media concentration law. Moreover, it would be easy to translate the provisions governing media monopolization in this legislation (MStV) into the digital sphere, including the 30% market share cap for media genres relevant for the shaping of political opinions. However, recent upgrades of this legislation have focused on analog media—potentially based on the misconception that the EU is responsible. Thus, a renewal of these open legislative tasks has been postponed for more than 12 years.

Accordingly, we see a substantial threat to free and independent media that is not being tackled by serious countermeasures. In the past, independence of the media meant that the media should not be controlled by anybody—not by the state, but also not by other groups or agents, such as religious associations or powerful corporations. In a situation where entire media categories relevant to the shaping of political opinions are owned and controlled by big tech corporations, this independence is destroyed. Under the conditions of monopolies, we have also lost pluralism of providers. Moreover, due to the high interdependence between the tech companies and Western governments in fields such as the hosting and storing of government data as well as cybersecurity, the principle of the independence of the media from the state will be abolished. Finally, we will lose journalism on a broad scale.

Due to the fact that the tech platforms have “succeeded” in being regulated not as media, but as “service providers” or “intermediaries”, they will have managed in just a few years from now to nullify the full set of principles that have guided the regulation of the media as the foundation of our Western democracies for decades. The principles of classic media law will no longer apply.

4. Digital Media Monopolies—Possible Solutions

As we have seen, it is hardly possible to break up existing monopolies or dominant market positions on the basis of existing legislation in Germany or the EU. However, it should at least be possible to regulate these monopolies more consistently and effectively and limit their impact. Some of the measures required for this could probably already be derived from existing European Union competition law, namely the general ban on the abuse of dominant market positions and/or, since May 2023, the Digital Markets Act; others would require even more legislative courage than has been shown so far. How the overall package of effective regulation of digital media monopolies of platforms should be designed can be quickly outlined as follows as a blueprint for future legislation:

• Freedom for outlinks: it should be easy to enforce a free design of outlinks for content creators. Platforms should be forced to allow outlinks at every level of the content, i.e., at the level of the headlines, the image or video and the text. Furthermore, within apps, it should be ensured that when an outlink is called up by users, the in-app browser is left and the selected offer is used outside the platform. Every click on content must be respected as a decision by the user to leave the platform. The common practice of platforms to disadvantage posts with outlinks algorithmically (“dimming”) should be severely punished. Every structural barrier for outlinks, no matter how small, and also the pure disadvantage or dimming of posts with outlinks should be prohibited. Any such self-preferential treatment of platforms should be consistently prosecuted and severely punished as abuse of a dominant market position and/or violation of the prohibition of self-preferential treatment under Article 5, 5 of the Digital Markets Act. The principle to be enforced must be: if you want to be an open platform that is maintained by the work of users, you must enable those same users to attract traffic to their own offerings via relevant content without discrimination. If it turns out that the current legal situation still does not allow for this even after the Digital Markets Act has been passed, then the legislator is called upon to close this gap in digital competition law.
• A reliable method for creating monopolies is the establishment of closed standards, which bind users to a particular manufacturer or service provider and massively restrict people’s freedom to change. Conversely, open standards offer a simple and proven method of quickly creating competition and diversity. By establishing open standards, we can safeguard that no player has an insurmountable advantage in the market. Very large platforms should be forced to offer all content exclusively via open standards so that it can be used regardless of the provider. This would mean that users could share all content such as videos, images and texts seamlessly and at will from one platform to another. These open standards would also have to enable followers to be “taken along” across platforms after consent by easy and seamless mechanics. The Digital Markets Act only provides for partial interoperability obligations, even for digital gatekeepers. There is no general interoperability obligation for all gatekeepers, which would also cover “one-to-many communication” on social media platforms, for example.
• Separation of channel and content: digital platforms with a dominant market position would have to be separated into two levels at company level, which would then separately monetize the distribution channel on the one hand and the content on the other. To illustrate this with an example, there would then be a company for YouTube platform services and a company for YouTube content services. The video platform itself would have to be designed to be interoperable. From this perspective, YouTube platform services would be transformed into an operator that enables various providers (beyond YouTube) to operate channels independently and in competition with YouTube content services and to monetize them through advertising. We could even allow independent agencies or big content providers to host content independently on such a platform. In other digital categories such as search engines, we can apply proven successful models of syndication, enabling competitors to enter the market with a realistic chance to succeed.
• Media content—enabling diversity and competition: no competitor should have more than 30% of the usage share in digital categories relevant to democracy, such as search, free video on demand or social media.
• Independent control of concentration: similar to the control mechanisms described above for analog media and broadcasting, an independent authority should periodically (i.e., annually) determine the degree of concentration of the various digital media markets and publish it. These analyses would have to be carried out on the basis of scientific measurements of real usage and be based on aggregated usage time (the analysis of net reach is not sufficient here as an indicator, as outlined above).
• Liability: at the same time, the current unequal legal treatment of liability should be reduced, which ironically also actively punishes the analog media of press publishers or broadcasting for carefully checking the published information according to the usual journalistic criteria and quality standards. The flourishing digital corporations do not check anything and are additionally exempt from liability (with the exception of the new Copyright Directive). The massive inequality of treatment can be illustrated by the case of podcaster Joe Rogan: if Joe Rogan disseminates controversial statements via a platform such as Spotify, the company is not responsible, regardless of whether it paid Joe Rogan USD 100 million for the exclusive licensing rights or how much profit it generates from this content through advertising or fees. If Rogan distributed exactly the same content on a private television station, the station would have to assume full liability for distribution. Instead, any form of monetization through advertising should be seen as a clear indication that a company has ”appropriated” the content used and monetized it. Whoever assumes economic responsibility for specific content must also bear responsibility for the same content. All platforms are free to introduce additional alternative offers or feeds on their platforms that do not assume any liability for dissemination (such as «Facebook/Youtubeunfiltered»)—however, no economic monetization through advertising may then take place in such a “program” or feed. In this way, it remains open to every user to express their opinion on such platform offerings in a free (and “unfiltered”) manner. The advantage of including the aspect of monetization in the debate is obvious. It helps to break the current deadlock between control and freedom and therefore enables new, constructive and innovative approaches to solutions. It certainly makes sense to carefully weigh up the extent to which such measures will impair freedom of expression and to consider the different perspectives holistically when making this assessment.

5. Status Quo: A Break with the Anti-Monopolistic Principles of Media Law

An examination of the various texts of classic German media law quickly reveals the problems and limitations of analog media which are long gone. The legal provisions are written against a backdrop of limited information, a shortage of access, costly methods of transmission and infrastructures, etc., topics that have largely lost their relevance as a result of digitization. This context of analog media also makes the central legal intention of a “basic supply of information” for the citizens of Germany understandable (“Grundversorgung”). Considering today‘s digital flood of information, no one would consider this “basic supply of information” to be at risk today.

Furthermore, after the terrible experience of the enforced conformity of the media under National Socialism in Germany, the fear of any influence by organs of the state or political parties is strongly reflected in the current legal norms. Against this background, the public’s strong rejection of any “censorship” is understandable to this day. The existing law has therefore provided our media with excellent protection against state influence and intervention. Fortunately, another “SPIEGEL affair” which endangered the German freedom of the press in 1962 would be unthinkable today.

The threat to media freedom today comes from an entirely different direction. And it was impossible for the authors of our media laws to foresee this threat back in the day. If we look into the imminent future, the dynamics of the ongoing digital transformation alone will leave our media universe in the hands of the GAFA corporations. We have hardly any legal tools at hand to counter this development.

It is obvious that in the digital sphere, the GAFA corporations have already succeeded in building their own structures as the foundations of our future media ecosystem. They now control the digital networks and access (distribution and communication channels)—because anyone who is not active on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp virtually does not exist socially. Compared to the analog media world, the situation today is as if an individual company owned the entire TV or telephone network.

While monopolies in “normal” markets only cause economic damage, it is immediately apparent that total access to segments of the media would also lead to massive and serious damage to the foundations of our democracy. We can assume that the authors of our classic media legislation would have created much more efficient tools for the breakup of monopolies if they had foreseen the technological possibilities of digitization and the easy mechanisms to establish digital monopolies back then. But the dangers of such monopolies were hardly conceivable at the time these laws were created. Back then, the major mass media of the time such as radio, television, telephone were played out via state-anchored infrastructures. The state’s power of disposition over these infrastructures either offered options for balanced programming or, later on, enabled controlled licensing, as in the case of private television.

The status quo of unchallenged digital media monopolies is therefore in open contradiction to the applicable norms of German media law. Because media law affects fundamental rights, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany has often ruled on fundamental issues in the past (Dörr 2008, p. 133f.; KEK 2022, p. 16). Due to the massive preferential treatment and privileges of digital media (no liability, no regulations against concentration) in relation to analog business models (for example, for broadcasting or the press), we have to assume that this unequal treatment is anti-constitutional in Germany. Due to the similarity of legal provisions in the Western world, this will presumably also be the case in other democracies. It is obvious that much stricter laws and tougher sanctions would be required to protect our media than the ones we have for markets in which “normal” economic goods are traded.

6. Digital Monopolies Threaten Our Media Democracy, but Are Not an Issue in the Public Sphere

Although the future takeover of our media system by the GAFA corporations can be predicted with at least the same precision as climate change, so far we did not have a significant political debate on the subject in the public domain. This could also be due to the fact that proposals for change such as the measures described above in the past have often led to protests from various streams of net activists (Golumbia 2024). Potential measures that could limit the power of the internet giants often generated immediate fears of state intervention and a possible restriction of freedom of speech. This has led to the ironic situation where, in this aspect, parts of the cyber community have (probably unintentionally) fought side by side with the tech giants for “internet freedom” understood as the desirable absence of regulation.

The fact that the digital corporations liked to tie in ethically with such positions (they only defended “internet freedom” and “freedom of speech” against state intervention and bureaucratic regulation etc.) should hardly surprise even very naive observers. Even worse, these ideologies are now being shamelessly used by right-wing populist groups and antidemocratic organizations (Nagle 2018). For example, Trump’s own social network is operating under the name “Truth Social”, while radical right-wing platforms such as Telegram, Parler, MeWe, GAB and so on are currently making a name for themselves by consistently making “the right to freedom of expression” their core programmatic statement and opposing the allegedly prevailing general “censorship”. It is quite ironic that this perceived fear of “censorship” is expressed despite the fact that people have more media and channels at hand to express their opinions than ever before in the long history of the media.

Only in this context is it understandable that the threat posed by digital gatekeepers is hardly being addressed in the public sphere, even though it should be obvious even to very unbiased or naïve observers what our media system will look like in a few years. Future generations will possibly rub their eyes in amazement at how a handful of tech corporations managed to complete their takeover of our media system in broad daylight without facing any serious public resistance. The underlying “deal” is that we accept their dominance as a tradeoff against the “gift” they have made to us all, which is a new level of “freedom of speech” and the possibility of digital interaction and participation.

But if we spell out this “deal” in detail over time, it becomes clear how bad it will turn out for democratic societies. “Freedom of speech” (which is currently being openly abused on the platforms for criminal offenses, defamation, false factual claims, discrimination, Holocaust denial, etc.) is being “saved” here from alleged state “censorship”, only to be handed over to the full future control of digital corporations. And these tech corporations are not democratically legitimized.

In this scenario, “freedom of speech” is not even secured for Western societies, the exact opposite is the case: it is destroyed in a much more fundamental way. In the future, our freedom of speech will be subject to the rule and control of a few monopolistic gatekeepers. Digital freedom of speech will then only develop on the basis of the surveillance structures, dissemination mechanisms and algorithms of the big digital corporations.

This future media system will then be fully controlled by monopolistic black boxes whose inner rationalities will forever elude our grasp. This will not only apply to users—science and the public will also have no access to the collected data that remains within the walled gardens of the platforms. It is time for us as a society to have a fundamental debate about whether we really want to accept the imminent takeover of our media system with the consequences described above (if it is not already too late anyway—see Hachmeister et al. 2022, p. 31).

But here, science and research have a central role to play. The topic is not only extremely complex, it also breaks through the boundaries, models, heuristics and, above all, lexicons of very different disciplines such as media studies, media law, economics, political science and so on. At the same time, the public and politicians need reliable studies and differentiated models, especially when it comes to such difficult topics. These can then be used to provide the necessary substantive guidelines for specific solutions in the form of regulation.

In view of the massive and obvious dangers, science should immediately become active in the service of society on an interdisciplinary basis. It would therefore be welcome if the various scientific disciplines concerned would join forces in order to restore competition and provider pluralism in the digital media markets, preventing a future takeover of our society’s media system by the tech corporations, thus safeguarding free media and democracy.