Pluralism through Governance: Regulating the New (Social) Media Ecosystem (Max Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition Research Paper, No. 26-11), 2026, 33
There is an unexplored dimension of media pluralism in the digital platform economy, namely the coexistence of multiple governance modes across the socio-technical arrangements through which news and content are produced and circulate. This dimension of pluralism is at risk when a single, top-down, centralized governance logic prevails, as is the case with the few big tech companies that control the framing operations that prepare and format transactions and content circulation in social media and the media sector. After demonstrating that new EU regulations are limited by a supply-demand market epistemology that fails to address this dimension of pluralism, the paper proposes-drawing on open and federated protocol initiatives-a policy approach in which interoperability obligations and targeted industrial policy are grounded in a pluralism-through-governance framework. Lastly, the paper proposes a resourceegalitarian distribution of governance power that enables the contestability of the hegemonic framings currently shaping the digital public space.
