Governance by history

Workplace surveillance

Platform Dependency

8 September 2026 - Platform Dependence in Public Communication - Ceren and Rodrique (work in progress)

I.                PLATFORM DEPENDENCE IN PUBLIC COMMUNICATION – WHAT IS IT , WHO IS AFFECTED BY IT AND WHY IT MATTERS LEGALLY AND INSTITUTIONALLY – C

A.           Public communication is the conveyance of a message to a large group of people. This includes public announcements, advertisements in public spaces, social media broadcasts, news delivered in reporting, editorials, opinion pieces, and even political campaigns. Platform dependence is the reliance on a third party platform or digital infrastructure to reach the audience of the public communication, the public. Platform dependence in public communication therefore includes reliance on private companies like Meta (Facebook), state television channels, or telecommunications providers who provide and control access to, and develop the infrastructure of such platforms. For the purpose of this exercise, news will be utilized as the main example of public communication.

B.          Those who are affected by platform dependence in public communication are the communicators and the public alike. News outlets are mainly for-profit organizations. These organizations’ reliance on third party digital platforms grows day-by-day to maintain their popularity and engagement (such as on social media platforms) ultimately deciding the revenue generated from advertisers. The public on the other hand are provided catchier and more diluted information, gaining just enough knowledge to grab their attention while not being provided substantial knowledge on matters. Additionally,i members of the public who do not have the resources to access such platforms and digital services remain “information poor”. Digital rich, the virtual class of tech-professional and entrepreneurs benefit from the dependence to their platforms.

C.            This is crucial as platform dependence may threaten democracy and free political expression. Platforms, run by private parties, can be run according to their political beliefs. Social media platforms aiming to keep users online utilize algorithms that provide their users with their confirmed preferences, not allowing the conveyance of a truly heteregenious catalogue of news. The original ideal of the democratic electronic agora is undermined when private corporations control the flow of news and the infrastructure on which they are provided.

II.              HISTORICAL LINEAGE – HISTORICAL MOMENTS/DECISIONS/INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS - R

It is very difficult to discuss news without highlighting the deep entanglement it shares with with information. For our purpose 'information' will have the the following characteristics; it can be learned, processed, archived, and it's worth correlates to its rarity.

[1 ]

News is the end result of the process of taking this information from one form to another, and transmitting to a wider, typically public audience is what we will anchor our definition of 'news' to be. There is and has always been an obvious tension between the rarity that gives information its worth and the act of transmission that makes it less rare. Modern form of this can be traced to Renaissance Europe,

[2 ]

where a single innovation not only leaned on but also displaced established pattern of trusted networks collecting, processing and sharing news by way of the church, merchants, students, diplomats and so on.

[3 ]

This innovation is the invention of printing in the 15th century. It had consequences beyond those imagined by its inventor, as it offered new possibilities for the dissemination of news. It must be reiterated that printing benefitted from the existing networks and not the other way around. This is evident by Johann Carolus'  Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien handwritten weekly newspaper for an elite audience fruitfully running prior to the advent of printing. However, the printing press coupled with existing network and infrastructure of the postal system brought industrialisation and scale unknown to the trade and the world at the time. One of the first paying customer for press was the Church, selling indulgences. Beniger's stands: control depends on information processing and communication working together, and the this innovation at that current point time supplied both at once.

[4 ]

Nonetheless, a strong parallel between the press and later computing revolutions it's stated relationship with state.

[5 ]

With the former seeming to lean more towards the state and the other in the opposite direction.

The next pivotal historical point which disturbs the way in which news is transmitted is by way of the radio. The radio is huge leap frog as it permitted the decoupling of reach from cost, reliance on aging network such as the postal system. Where the method of control under print was through the content printed, the radio moved closer to physics on licensing broadcast rights. This changed the trajectory of new's as it birth the state owned monopoly broadcaster, responsible for broadcasting news to anyone with a receiver on the other end within appropriate frequency. News outlet now had more than one method for distributing news and for the first time had a way of engaging in dialogue on the news of the day as it makes it way via print and sound-wave. Diversity of dependency is an important aspect of this stage in history.

III.             MECHANISM OF PATH DEPENDENCE - C

A.            The public is generally partaking in consuming content on social media. Hence, with its 3 billion monthly active users for example, Instagram has an installed base for news outlets to depend upon (Instagram Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026), n.d.). The audiences of news outlets spend an increasing amount of their time on social media platforms, which gives results in a habitual entrenchment for these news outlets: the means of reaching the audience is dependent on their habits of content consumption. An indirect contractual entrenchment may also be discussed, as news outlets have obligations to their advertisers (who may request the upkeep of views/clicks on the news platforms they pay to advertise in). Cultural entrenchment should not be disregarded: the public expects to receive their news on social media platforms they readily frequent, and many news outlets meet this expectation. Hence, news outlets must partake in building a presence in social media platforms if they wish to compete.

IV.            POLITICS AND DISTRIBUTION – WHOSE INTERESTS ARE STRENGTHENED AND WHO HAS FEWER CHOICES - C

A.            Barbook argues that although the California Ideology claims that state power will be decreased and individuals will be empowered through decentralized networks enabled by digital technologies, he demonstrates that public communication is in fact not immune to undemocratic powers. These include private corporations: these corporations may gatekeep in choosing when and how to provide access to their platforms, while finetuning how users navigate their platforms.

By enabling access to content that users tend to agree with, those who manage these platforms enable public opinion to shift to extremes. Being “fed” the same narrative and not being challenged to see an opposing perspective ultimately provides fewer choices to the consumer of the information, the general public. Therefore, individual agency is constrained by platform architecture and control, not liberated by it.

V.              AT WHAT POINT IN HISTORY WAS A DIFFERENT TRAJECTORY POSSIBLE? - R

A.            News not subscribing to / presenting news on social media as platform (?)

VI.            GOVERNANCE IMPLICATION – ONE PROPOSITION FOR CURRENT DAY GOVERNANCE - R

OPEN PLATFORMS (ALTERNATIVE FACEBOOK A)

<section class="footnotes">

1. Mark Greengrass, Thierry Rentet and Stéphane Gal, ‘The Hinterland of the Newsletter: Handling Information in Space and Time’ in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Brill 2016)
   http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w8h1ng.34accessed 7 September 2026; ‘Michel Serres Prononce En Sorbonne La Conférence Inaugurale Du Programme Paris Nouveaux Mondes - La Chancellerie Des Universités de Paris’ (La Chancellerie des Universités de Paris, 1 January 2013)
   https://www.sorbonne.fr/michel-serres-prononce-en-sorbonne-la-conference-inaugurale-du-programme-paris-nouveaux-mondes/accessed 7 September 2026. James Ralph Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard Univ Press 1986).
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2. Brendan Dooley, Making News in Renaissance Europe (1st edn, Cambridge University Press 2026)
   https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009358835.
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3. Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (Yale University Press 2014). Helmer Helmers, ‘Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe: Towards a New History of News’ (2016) 22 Media History 401
   https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2016.1174570.
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4. James Ralph Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard Univ Press 1986) P24-25
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5. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology (1996)
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Centralization of AI Compute and Data

Historical Lineage

Limitation of Machine Learning

The AI revolution was built on the limitation of human capabilities to process large information and derive efficient results - where before there existed only facilitative tools to allow for human-enabled processes, AI now offered derivations and cognitive reasoning in moments and at large scales.

Revert to physical infrastructure dependency in the rush to be the best

The present AI model heavily relies on hardware in order to perform complex data processing for deep learning. The data centre models followed require larger model sizes (which require higher resource, information and capital investment) to be able to yield better results. Due to the limitation of resources and a rush to establish the best working model of an AI agent, data centres are built on a rudimentary model heavily dependent on massive amounts of electricity and fresh water.

Regulation and decentralization of information

Regulation and influence of sovereigns and institutions has resulted in data sharing and information exchange structurally through open source and cloud computing. But, while AI models claims their selling point to be accessibility for all, their information and derivations remain in a closed server, stored for the purpose of training their AI agents to be the best. Big AI contenders attract higher consumer and information flows overall resulting in a better developed AI model, proving disadvantageous in any market where early contenders have an advantage and accumulation of power.

Mechanisms of Path Dependence

Early on in the industry there is an expectation of human and capital investment from all stakeholders involved, this high cost for entry into the market and expected capital to sustain and develop a model by both consumer and enterprise makes for a high switching cost. For the AI model to run and scale there is a presumption that the rate of growth is dependent on the size of data fed, resulting in a better model and hence, more consumer usage. A closed centralised data loop is created but the requirement for storage and processing far surpasses current infrastructures capabilities - heavily relying on early market entry advantage and sustained capital investments taking away from smaller aspirants and hoarding of power within closed circles. Despite its physical dependency, AI data processing has unique requirements beyond legacy infrastructures - larger demand and production of GPUs and designed to handle immense thermal heat generated while consuming electricity beyond current capabilities. 

The AI space largely remains unregulated due to its undefined form and fluid nature, however, this has given way for unethical and morality issues regarding data privacy, exploitation of labour and environmental harms.

Politics and Distribution

Concentration strengthens the values, interests, capacities, and authority of the “Big Tech” over other actors of public and private nature. In this context, Barbrook and Cameron illuminate the ethos behind AI technology development while Winner makes observable the power relations surrounding it: concentration is the consequence of an AI development anchored in the belief that it must be free from all institutional and normative restriction since it is inherently liberating and non-political which, in turn, provides a political/moral justification for the concentration (if technology is inherently liberating and non-political then there is no power relations to observe or question) that translates itself into power dynamics where the AI developer not only owns the AI technology but also decides how it is trained and deployed and which models the user can or cannot access.

Contingency and Alternatives

Concentration is due, first and foremost, to the fact that AI computing capacity requires massive and cutting-edge physical infrastructure - such as data centers and microprocessors - which, in turn, requires upfront investments that are unaffordable to most companies. In David’s language, companies that could finance the infrastructure and position themselves first obtained self-reinforcing advantages and a “lock-in” effect in the market. In other words, concentration is the consequence of the development of AI physical infrastructure privately with no mixed or public alternatives as a public service. Therefore, there was a space for an alternative future at the end of the 1980s or the beginning of the 1990s when the privatization model of the technological infrastructure was consolidated in line with the “Californian Ideology”. In that moment governments had the chance to treat technological infrastructure as a mixed or public good rendering it universally accessible as it was the case of the Internet; this would have permitted companies of all sizes to profit from economies of scale, reducing entry barriers and fostering competition. However, this alternative path did not prevail since the Californian Ideology provided the moral/political justification to exclude governments from the development of technological infrastructure in the exact moment in which such a decision would produce structural consequences. If that path had been followed it could have contributed to collective access to economies of scale, lower entry barriers, and a more competitive AI market.

Governance Implication

Considering the above, public or mixed investment on AI physical infrastructure is a necessary governance measure for market decentralization and collective access to AI computing capacity and data. From an historical perspective, the proposed measure is not merely a corrective action for a market failure but for a contingent and ideological decision made between the late 1980s and early 1990s that produced a structural “path dependence” that now is necessary to change.