DNPA meet to discuss anti-trust, Big Tech monopoly

Leading figures from Australia’s think tank and antitrust regulatory circles, along with the heads of India’s top news publishers, will converge on Friday at the inaugural edition of the DNPA Dialogues, a first-of-its-kind conference to be hosted by the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA).

The 1st DNPA Dialogue will see the cream of India’s media industry exchange ideas with Australian dignitaries and brainstorm ways to build better, fairer, and fruitful partnerships between tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, and the country’s news publishers.

Rod Sims, Ex-Chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and a prominent face of the country’s regulatory initiatives, will be among the speakers at the summit, which will see the eminent speakers engage and discuss topics covering the collaboration between Big Tech and digital news media, the significance of antitrust measures around the world, and the future of the digital news ecosystem.

Sims was instrumental in getting Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code rolled out, which made it easier for Australian news media to sign deals with tech platforms such as Google and Facebook. He headed the ACCC from 2011-2022. He is now a professor with the Crawford School of Public Policy at Australian National University, and Chairman of the Steering Committee, Competition Research Policy Network at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, in London.

Emma McDonald, Senior Policy Adviser at Minderoo Foundation, Peter Lewis, Director at The Australia Institute, and James Meese, Senior Lecturer at Melbourne’s RMIT University will also attend the conference to be held in webinar format.

The pathbreaking, cross-continent conference on the publisher-platform relationship is a brainchild of the DNPA, a Delhi-based umbrella organisation of the digital wings of India’s leading 17 news publishers. The independent advocacy body promotes equality and fairness in how news organisations and Big Tech companies engage in the digital ecosystem. India.com