Governance of news aggregators’ practices across five emblematic cases: Policy regimes between normative acceptance and resistance

Abstract

During the 2005–2015 decade, news publishers, governments, and digital news aggregators re-negotiated the parameters of control over the circulation of digital content. Using governance and regime theory, we analyze five emblematic cases—Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom—of early governance reactions to news aggregators’ practices and identify different types of strategies: (1) discursive resistance; (2) controlled drop-out; (3) one-time payments; (4) opt-in ancillary copyright law; and (5) strict ancillary copyright law. Through contextualizing and triangulating, we explain the nuanced ways in which legacy actors struggled to find adequate strategies to maintain their definitional power when technology companies first manifested their interest in the news sector. The findings indicate a link between the strength of policy regimes that sustained copyright as a normative monopoly and shifts in normative interpretations. With that, we highlight the importance of considering policy regimes’ constituencies as an explanatory dimension when studying change and maintenance in media governance.