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The rise and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) is having an exponential impact on the process of transformation and realignment of global geopolitics. While the United States, China and to a lesser extent the European Union (EU) are leading the “race” to develop AI in a climate of confrontation, the technological development of AI is much more multifaceted and global than the geopolitical discourse of the major powers, with emerging actors and ecosystems that should not be underestimated. In line with the calls to create more inclusive frameworks of global AI governance, this paper explores what role the Global South plays in the geopolitics of AI. It analyses the spaces, actors and concerns currently overlooked in the dominant discourses on the geopolitics of AI, perspectives that are essential to understand how algorithmic systems are going to develop in the coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I aim to clarify some of the ways in which the auditory dimension of the self is constituted through the mediation of technology. I show that by excluding our immediate surroundings with mobile personalized and private auditory technologies, we are increasingly laying down a personal, inner spatial grid of acoustic memories that get integrated into our narrative identity and co-constitutes the space of familiarity and belonging that gives us a sense of who we are. To do so, I first lay out a clear ontological ground. Next, I outline how the auditory dimension of the self is constituted and subsequently mediated technologically. Finally, I bring to bear Erving Goffman’s theatrical framework of performative self-constitution as a useful framework to illustrate how, on one hand, the culturally available repertoire on which the imagination draws to constitute the self has augmented thanks to the contributions of other people in distal spatiotemporal contexts; on the other, the reconfiguration of how we listen to the world and the other people in it entails muting or blocking out of other voices. This can stunt how we conceive of ourselves, producing an epistemic bubble involving a tunnel “vision” or echo-chamber effect. In addition, due to the coupling of bodily and cognitive structures with mobile, privatized auditory technologies that thereby become transparent in experience, others, by listening in on us, acquire the ability to privilege certain types of behavior while suppressing others. Thus, there is a danger that the individual autonomous agency so important to self-constitution can be compromised.

As television is embracing a new set of internet-related technologies, the medium is transitioning from broadcasting to streaming. With it, a new mode of distribution has emerged: the streaming platform. This research makes a three-pronged effort to assess their impact on the TV industry: it analyses the way platforms monetize content; it distinguishes types of streaming platforms based on a set of criteria that includes supply-chain arrangements and the way they structure commercial transactions among different sets of participants, and it considers the ownership of streaming services. This article contributes to media and communication studies by combining the platform literature with global value chain (GVC) theory in order to foster our understanding of streaming platforms. It contextualizes streaming platforms in the history of television and analyses how they are transforming the medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way in which we describe processes of automation, the digital society and the technology companies that deliver many of its services carry implicit and sometimes contradicting values and ideas about the society envisioned. In this paper, we are interested in unfolding some of the metaphors that guide political discourses on digitalisation in Denmark, particularly those related to the nexus between the welfare state and the market. We propose that metaphorical analysis of policy documents serves to tease out and confront the implicit values and tensions related to how welfare ideologies are reconciled with market logics. This carries important messages about the Danish government's imaginary of digitalisation and citizens, such as which role citizens are expected to play vis-à-vis digital services and welfare provisions. This paper argues that in contrast to the EU's declared goal of human-centric digitalisation, the Danish government relies on metaphors that are technology-centric rather than human-centric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After two decades of regulatory vacuum, powerful digital platforms such as Google and Meta/Facebook, also known as the "Digital Lords" (Brevini 2020), have faced growing criticism worldwide. They are accused of possessing excessive economic, political, and ideological influence while evading public accountability. Although there have been calls to address their monopolistic market dominance, such as antitrust measures to break their stranglehold on data, the most tangible interventions have focused on policy tools to make the Digital Lords contribute to journalism. With governments hesitant to allocate public funds for public interest journalism, policymakers in various countries are exploring avenues to make these wealthy and tax-avoiding Digital Lords pay for the news they distribute. The "Journalism Competition and Preservation Act" is presently being deliberated in Congress in the United States, with the objective of aiding small and mid-sized news organizations in their negotiations with digital platforms for fair compensation for the utilization of their content. The European Union has implemented a copyright reform granting press publishers the right to be remunerated by Digital Lords for the use of newspapers and magazines. One widely discussed policy tool in this regard is the Australian "News Media Bargaining Code." This article examines the successes and failures of the code, adopted a year and a half ago, in addressing Australia's journalism crisis and its pressing issues of media diversity and news scarcity. Ultimately, it argues that the Australian Media Bargaining Code exemplifies the progressive privatization of media policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intense public debate is currently taking place in the US. The main subject of this debate is tech giants and the antitrust law reform. The fundamental dilemma is whether giant corporations, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, fit the traditional antitrust law or not. Senator Klobuchar proposed the new bill (the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act) in 2021, and Congress is currently between a rock and a hard place. If Congress decides to support the New Brandeis movement and enact the bill, it could harm the tech giants and make the US start lagging behind China. If it decides otherwise, it could cause considerable dissatisfaction among US voters. This paper analyses the bill in detail and explores the possible outcomes. The conclusions suggest that enactment of the bill could have overwhelmingly adverse economic consequences for the competitiveness of US markets, innovation, and consequently for consumer welfare.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires tech giants to identify and remove apps from their platforms that use deceitful sales tactics or violate user privacy. Tech giants have often resisted FTC orders because policing diminishes their profits. But while some firms have eventually complied with FTC demands, other firms have continued to shirk enforcement at the risk of escalating fines. What accounts for these different responses? Examining Apple, Google and Facebook, we find that tech giants willingly police consumer fraud but not consumer privacy violations. Failures to police fraud have led to public complaints and negative press attention, while failures to police data breaches often go undetected by users, the media and thus the FTC. We conclude that tech giants can act as effective regulatory agents on the government's behalf, but only when they police activities they cannot conceal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational political communication, based on big data analytics of social media texts, provides a paradigm for understanding the public's view of and engagement with political events worldwide. This study reviews previous efforts by social and data scientists and offers a demo to show the potential of computational political communication. To characterize online political communication dynamics surrounding U.S.-China tensions and gain a better understanding of the U.S.-China power struggle, a vast amount of user-generated Twitter data is compiled from March 2020 to March 2021 globally. Chinese IT giants (Huawei, Tencent, and ByteDance) and major English-speaking countries (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Pakistan) are chosen as keywords for filtering the tweets gathered. Sentiment analysis of the tweets is carried out automatically. It is found that the popularities of debates regarding certain nations and companies are uneven and might be triggered by events. Furthermore, rather than being segregated, the discourses of all of these companies are intertwined. It is expected that future studies can apply more fine-grained, categorized, and automated sentiment and topic analysis to show a panorama of online public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intense public debate is currently taking place in the US. The main subject of this debate is tech giants and the antitrust law reform. The fundamental dilemma is whether giant corporations, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, fit the traditional antitrust law or not. Senator Klobuchar proposed the new bill (the C ompetition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act) in 2021, and Congress is currently between a rock and a hard place. If Congress decides to support the New Brandeis movement and enact the bill, it could harm the tech giants and make the US start lagging behind China. If it decides otherwise, it could cause considerable dissatisfaction among US voters. This paper analyses the bill in detail and explores the possible outcomes. The conclusions suggest that enactment of the bill could have overwhelmingly adverse economic consequences for the competitiveness of US markets, innovation, and consequently for consumer welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the case study of Internet Protocol (IP) delivery for streaming television to demonstrate how technology and globalization combine to change what media firms do, how they create value and with whom. Media delivery – the sum of the value-adding tasks necessary to transfer content from source to audience – has become a mosaic of technologies that sustain a complex and fast-evolving video ecosystem. Broadcasters had been in charge of the full transmission process once, of tasks deemed core to their business. Today, media delivery is externalized to the market and devolved to a network of suppliers. These suppliers are no ordinary firms, but tech giants that have developed deep global capabilities. They gain further leverage by being cross-sectoral, serving clients across multiple industries. Who are these suppliers? What makes them unique? And what are the implications for the television industry? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How society should deal with the self-strengthening Tech Giants is a much-discussed issue. We suggest to democratize them by giving users a say in their decisions. With newly-developed collective decision rules and user councils, democratization of Tech Giants becomes feasible and complements, e.g., competition and basic data protection laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]