The impact of social media platforms on traditional media outlets and formats has been long debated and analysed, with the former and the latter pictured, most of the time, as in a very conflicting relationship. What has received far less attention is that, beneath the surface, a handful of Big Tech companies have started to supply mission critical digital infrastructure to most European news outlets. Cloud infrastructures provided and managed by a handful of large companies have silently become central to the production and circulation of news. In so doing, they are redistributing power in the sector in ways that often pass under the radar of regulators and policymakers. Cloud adoption in this scenario, therefore, poses new challenges to media freedom, independence and pluralism, and hence to the key role the media sector plays in a democratic society.
This blogpost seeks to introduce the readers to the ongoing discussions on the cloud’s politics and its impact on the media. First, it shows how the cloud is used as a vector of infrastructural power by a handful of Big Tech firms. It then argues that the media’s cloud adoption has to be understood of the sector’s ongoing financial and epistemic crisis, before outlining some of the main challenges to media freedom and independence that emerge from this infrastructure. It concludes by providing some concrete policy recommendations.
Infrastructural Power
The impact of Big Tech platforms on the distribution of information is well known by now. Platformisation changed the ways in which journalistic content circulates, centring algorithms as key agents in the information flow, and in public debate. The rise of targeted advertisement, largely shaped and controlled by digital platforms, siphons off a key revenue source for media companies. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) compounds the effects of platformisation. For example, AI-generated news summaries are further capturing audiences from news media outlets and enhancing the already considerable opinion power of big tech companies. While policy solutions to these challenges remain insufficient, there has been (and continues to be) a public debate around them. To a certain extent, these challenges informed the drafting of legislation like the European Media Freedom Act, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, although the solutions found therein have not been interpreted nor enforced at their fullest yet.
By contrast, the infrastructural dynamics underlying the process of news production, distribution and consumption remain relatively opaque. Even for specialised audiences and enforcers. Underneath the development and wide diffusion of platforms, first, and GenAI second, lies the cloud. Cloud infrastructures are technical systems allowing access to computational resources (both hardware and software) via the internet. Crucially, three firms (Amazon, Microsoft and Google), popularly known as cloud hyperscalers, dominate in the provision of cloud services worldwide.
These three hyperscalers account together for over 60% of the global cloud market, and have particularly dominant positions in the US and the EU. This grants them a considerable amount of infrastructural power, which they wield in more, or less, explicit ways. For instance, they leveraged their access to computational power to subtly shape the development of AI, giving privileged access to a handful of cherry-picked start-ups, including the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, who then leverage this advantage into developing a dominant position in the field, thereby durably shaping it. Hyperscalers therefore not only get to shape a new field in commercial software, but they are also ensuring the continued centrality of their services in its development and deployment.
However, they can also exert their power in more brutal ways, which can have a strong impact on people’s human rights, such as the rights to freedom of expression, access to information, non-discrimination. For example, in May 2025 Microsoft cut off the ICC chief prosecutor from its digital workspace. This was part of the retaliatory measures that the Trump administration took against the court for investigating the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. In that same vein, AWS was able to silence the far-right social network Parler overnight by dropping it off its cloud hosting services, citing concerns over content moderation in the run up to the 2021 storming of the US Capitol. While there are legitimate questions about Parler’s content moderation practices (or lack thereof), the fact that an infrastructure provider can make a value judgment regarding the content broadcasted by their clients set a worrying precedent for freedom of speech. In a nutshell, hyperscalers have a great deal of economic and political power, which also extends to the news media industry, although the latter remains fundamentally under-scrutinised and under-debated.
The Media’s Adoption of the Cloud
European news media organisations have widely adopted or migrated to cloud infrastructures over the last decade. Recent research has shown that these organisations think of the cloud as a “reliable and cheap” alternative to other infrastructural arrangements. In a journalistic context marked by an enduring financial and epistemic crisis, the cloud allows media companies to outsource their infrastructure and redirect their efforts towards activities considered as value-generating, such as content production or selling advertisement space. Moreover, cloud-based software services are often time more sophisticated than alternatives developed in-house. By migrating to the cloud, media companies can deploy all sorts of digital services that were previously prohibitively expensive, from data collection and processing tools to digital broadcasting technologies.
Yet, in order to use this “reliable and cheap” cloud, media organisations had to undergo internal restructuring. This transformation could be seen as part of a wider shift in the business models and incentives of the industry. After years of powerless competition with digital platforms, media outlets increasingly started to copy the logic of the platform economy. From developing multimedia content for social media to collecting user data for targeted advertisement, publishers increasingly leaned into cloud-based digital tools to develop new products and services.
All media organisations went through this second wave of adaptation to the digitalisation process with some managing better than others. Economies of scale play a huge role in infrastructural transitions: larger media conglomerates have more resources to develop customised solutions and take advantage of all the opportunities provided by the technology. For example, they can use it to collect user data and develop targeted advertisement services or integrate multimedia content in their products. Smaller outlets, by contrast, often have to use off-the-shelf solutions and adapt themselves to whatever their vendor provides. Regulators are fully aware of these economies of scale, and the increased large media conglomerates’ capacity to adapt to new technologies is often used as an argument to authorise mergers across different media groups.
Threats to Media Independence
However, regardless of size, structural dependence on hyperscalers’ cloud has become one of the main factors of contemporary media infrastructure. In practice affecting all sorts of organisations, from international conglomerates to local outfits. By relying so heavily on hyperscale cloud infrastructures, the media has significantly reduced its capacity to contest decisions made by their providers.
Again, the rollout of AI services exemplifies the infrastructural power of hyperscalers. AI features were unilaterally added to all sorts of software tools that underpin the production and circulation of media products, leaving little room for negotiation. The media had to adapt to this change ex post, coming up with measures to safeguard the deontological and economic bases of the sector in the face of a technology that fundamentally challenges them. Hyperscaler cloud dependency has created a situation where the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google do as they can and the media suffers as they must.
Beyond the development of new media technologies and formats, this level of infrastructure dependency raises urgent concerns over the very capacity of the media to operate independently. As mentioned above regarding the cases of the ICC and Parler, hyperscalers can deplatform their clients more or less at will, thereby rendering incapable of working in their usual conditions. Even if this threat is not realised, its very possibility can be enough to have a chilling effect on journalists and media companies.
Moreover, as thoroughly documented in the book Cloud Policy, hyperscalers have a long history of collaboration with the U.S. state. This alliance was codified in the 2018 CLOUD Act, which requires American cloud providers to disclose any information hosted on their services at the request of U.S. law enforcement agencies “regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States”. Such provision represents an obvious threat to journalists and their sources. It, again, raises the question as to whether European media companies are indeed capable of operating independently while ensuring the safety of their information, their employees and collaborators.
These multiple threats to media independence are particularly worrisome in a context where Europe seems to be gearing up for an “informational war”. The media is running the double risk of being caught in a geopolitical crossfire, while also being instrumentalised for state goals that do not align with their democratic duties towards the public. Infrastructures are not neutral in this process and can very much be a decisive ground in the battle for free speech and independent information. As eloquently put by an expert, “a free press built on captured infrastructure is only as free as the infrastructure providers allow it to be”.
Conclusions
More research is needed on the infrastructural underpinnings of media freedom and independence, and the effects that cloud dependency has on the overall ecosystem. Infrastructure remains relatively unaddressed by regulation, despite its centrality in the production and distribution of information. Beyond further exploring this topic, we can make two concrete recommendations for policy and decision makers, and other relevant stakeholders:
- Support an effective and dynamic mapping of dependencies, encourage a progressive divestment of media organisations on hyperscaler clouds and foster the emergence of alternatives. Sectors such as banking have longstanding policies of avoiding overreliance on individual providers and maintaining their own infrastructure as much as possible. We consider that media outlets should move towards such model as well, and be supported by adequate public policies, including financial support. In so doing, media outlets would not simply guarantee their own independence, they would also create demand and invest in alternative providers and help break the hyperscaler oligopoly.
- Make the cloud sector fair, contestable and diverse. Competition authorities and other relevant regulators should also effectively implement both competition rules and the DMA to reintroduce contestability in the cloud sector and support the establishment of diversity and choice for business users, including media outlets. Only if an open, fair and diverse ecosystem of infrastructural providers is guaranteed, the media sector can avoid dangerous dependencies and maintain the independence and freedom it needs to play its role in and for society.
What’s at stake is nothing more and nothing less than democracy.
