Erik Martin

In the last two decades, the digital marketplace has transformed the majority of the economy and the daily lives of billions of people worldwide. This transformation has delivered great gains to consumers and unlocked whole new technological opportunities for society to thrive. However, amidst these gains, palpable consumer harms and anti-competitive behaviors have also become clearer, and the bottom-up innovative dynamism that ushered forth the digital marketplace is increasingly under threat.

A healthy public sphere needs a healthy public media. We’ve built the equivalent for television and radio. Now it’s time to do it for the Internet. The simplest way to proceed is to tax major technology companies to pay for better content.  A billion-dollar federal funding infusion to upgrade public media would be a start — perhaps paid for by a “journalism tax” on the largest tech platforms, as has been proposed in Britain.