CPI - Market Concentration in Cloud Services and its Impact on Investigative Journalism

CJL Director Courtney Radsch & Senior Reporter Karina Montoya delve into the infrastructural role of cloud in watchdog journalism to illustrate how market concentration in cloud services can exacerbate existing harms by dominant digital platforms on news media sustainability. They argue that the design of policies seeking to redress potential harms to competition in cloud services should consider its effects in public interest journalism.

I. Introduction

By providing critical infrastructure to many businesses, cloud services have become indispensable for the provision of digital products and services, from social media to artificial intelligence (“AI”) models. Despite its soft and fluffy connotation, cloud services are better thought of as the backbone to the modern economy and information systems. How we govern this core infrastructure of the digital age has profound repercussions for wide swaths of the economy and our information and communications systems.

The cloud market is becoming more concentrated in the hands of three giant corporations as businesses and governments have moved their operations to the cloud, and advances in AI reinforce its importance. At the end of 2023, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google together controlled 67 percent of the global cloud services market share.2 Consumers deal with such tech behemoths even when they think they’re not. For example, popular platforms such as Netflix, Twitter, Zoom, and Slack depend on cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services.3

With the development of more sophisticated large language models (“LLMs”) that underpin generative AI applications, increased demand for cloud services is already exacerbating market concentration and harming fair competition.4

Public interest journalism is a keystone species of the information ecosystem because it informs the public, connects communities, and holds the powerful to account 5. Watchdog journalism, like data journalism and investigative journalism, is a particularly important subspecies that increasingly requires access to cloud services.

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