Episode 20 - Małgorzata Kozak - Press Publishers, Platform Power, and the Fight for Fair Remuneration

How should the law respond when digital news aggregators hold overwhelming bargaining power over the press publishers whose content they rely on? In this episode, we speak with Dr Małgorzata (Gosia) Kozak from the Institute of Law Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, who brings over fifteen years of competition law practice together with deep academic expertise in EU law and digital markets regulation. Drawing on her recent co-authored paper in the International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (IIC), Gosia walks us through why existing tools, from Article 15 of the CDSM Directive to abuse of dominance proceedings under Article 102 TFEU, have struggled to secure fair remuneration for press publishers. We discuss the cautionary tales of earlier German and Spanish legislative attempts, Google's response to the French Autorité de la Concurrence's intervention, and whether Australia's News Media Bargaining Code offers a workable template for Europe. The conversation also explores Gosia's recent work with Anna Gerbrandy on media pluralism as a competition law relevant harm, and closes by looking ahead to the challenges posed by AI-driven news summaries and tools like Google's AI Overviews. A must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of copyright, competition law, platform regulation, and democratic discourse.