And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Gordon Dimitrieff, whose focus is on platform non-market strategies as a form of power projection, with a particular interest in the music industry.
Platform regulation is now having a moment, with various regulatory approaches around the world, and platform providers increasingly have their own internal departments to deal with such regulatory interventions; Gordon’s focus here is on how streaming platforms have responded to Canadian regulatory developments.
Platforms do not exist in a vacuum, of course, but are companies operating within a market, which itself exists in a broader societal context (the non-market) – and these market and non-market elements intersect with each other and contain various other relevant stakeholders.
In Canada, legislation requires broadcasters to invest some funding into local content production, but how this is assessed and policed in the streaming industry remains somewhat nebulous; which platforms are covered by this, how their revenue is calculated, how local content investments are assessed; and other aspects are all yet to be determined in detail.
This project examined public record documents from the Canadian parliament and public submissions between 2019 and 2026, as well as court records from the Federal Court of Appeal challenging the eventual regulation, SEC filings, platform technical publications, and other documents. The corpus contains some 5,000 documents in total, with some 363 documents from the various platforms themselves.
Key themes that emerged addressed financial questions (Alphabet: what about user-generated content; Apple: what about bundled subscriptions; Amazon: what about intermediary services; Netflix: what about our own productions; Spotify: what about royalty pass-throughs) – these usually defend boundaries on what is counted, reframe existing activities as Canadian contributions, claim capabilities that do not exist, identify harmful unintended consequences, claim independent corroboration of their claims, and adjust narratives for the institution.
These sort into four underlying logics: excluding aspects from consideration; selecting certain activities for highlighting; segmenting stakeholders; and casting market elements as having non-market implications (or vice versa).
