Editorial | CARICOM and Big Tech

Caribbean Community (CARICOM) governments have it mostly right as they begin to think about what Big Tech and social media companies extract from the region’s economies.

But based on the outline sketched last week by the community’s chairman, Mia Mottley, after the heads of government summit in Barbados, the leaders missed a critical element: the effect Big Tech has on the viability of the Caribbean’s traditional media and its potential cost to the region’s democracy. At least, Ms Mottley did not declare this to be among the critical concerns of CARICOM’s governments. Which they must.

In that regard, this newspaper hopes that the Jamaican authorities share with their regional counterparts, the concerns the island’s media entities raised with local regulators two years ago, as well as any conclusions reached by the island’s Fair Trading Commission (FTC) in a study it was supposed to undertake on Big Tech’s effect on competitions in the domestic market. It is not clear whether that analysis, which the FTC announced a year and a half ago, was ever done, and if it was completed, what were its findings. That has not been reported.

According to Ms Mottley, at the Bridgetown summit, CARICOM’s leaders appointed the Grenadian prime minister, Dickon Mitchell, who has responsibility for the telecoms in the community’s quasi-cabinet, and Bermuda’s premier, David Burt, to lead a review of the region’s “telecommunications environment”, looking particularly at the provision and use of services provided by the powerful tech giants, and the contribution they make to Caribbean economies.

These companies (the likes of Google and its subsidiary, YouTube; Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram; and TikTok’s owner, ByteDance) earn, by the region’s estimates, around US$11.6 billion a year in Caribbean markets, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

“And they pay no taxes and contribute in no way to the regional economy,” Ms Mottley said at a press briefing.

Which is the argument that this newspaper has been making to Jamaica’s and other Caribbean governments for several years.

FREE RIDE

This time, the case has been pressed by the region’s telecoms operators. They are feeling the pinch as Big Tech push free, or cheap, services across their platforms, eroding the revenues of regional telecoms, at the very same time, according to Ms Mottley, “we need to be looking at reinvesting in making our telecoms infrastructure sturdier”.

Regional governments, the Barbadian prime minister said, wanted to “level the playing field to ensure that there is fairness” and to provide “a competitive environment”, even as the region delivers affordable and competitive telecommunications costs to consumers.

The argument that the Big Tech hyperscalers have an almost free ride, while sucking huge sums out of Caribbean economies, is unimpeachable.

They maintain no offices or formal legal presence in the region, so there are no entities within national boundaries to tax. And there are no laws, as exist in some countries, such as in the European Union, to force Big Tech to pay once their earnings in markets reach specific thresholds.

Understandably, too, until this embryonic, collaborative initiative by CARICOM, the governments of small island states in the Caribbean have been reluctant to act against some of the world’s biggest corporations, fearful of retaliation, as Facebook and Google have unleashed on several countries that have insisted that they pay taxes or compensate media companies, whose journalistic output they often scoop up for free.

As The Gleaner has pointed out in the past, while Big Tech are avenues to information and entertainment for Caribbean citizens, they have little or no accountability to Caribbean governments or communities. Not only do they increasingly displace them, as they do in other parts of the world, Big Tech pay regional media cents on the dollar they receive for the ads they place on the online sites of Caribbean media entities. Yet it is these same entities’ journalistic content which Big Tech vacuum up for free, which plays a major part in driving audiences, and eyeballs, to those ads.

IMPORTANT PILLARS

With respect to traditional media, Big Tech, having squeezed their advertising incomes, thereby limit regional media’s ability to pay for the professional journalism they are ethically obligated to provide, which includes robust institutional frameworks to protect the integrity of the information they deliver to audiences. That is the same information that the hyperscalers generally aggregate for free.

This has potentially negative, long-term consequences for Caribbean democracy, as formal, structured media are pushed to the economic brink.

Free, independent media are important elements of democratic societies. They amply voices, allow for a transmission of information, and facilitate exchange and debate of ideas. They hold those who control power to account.

This, of course, is also done by the citizen journalist, empowered by the low entry barriers allowed by advances in technology. But often without the same commitment to truth, accuracy and accountability upon which traditional media are mostly founded, and for which they expensively maintain critical checks and balances. Moreover, traditional media can, and often are, more readily held accountable to the law and regulatory authorities.

The erosion of those arrangements ultimately removes important pillars upon which democracy rests. That cannot be good for any society.