Titans of tech are far from having it all their own way

There will be less dominance by a few players in years ahead.

Here we are in the midst of an e-evolution, looking for a moral and intellectual GPS at a time when our phone is supposed to measure heartbeat, steps walked, stairs climbed, hours slept but gives no true sense of perspective or place. Here we are, whatever our beliefs, surrounded by seething secularism, sclerotic scepticism, wondering about bearings, baring souls, disappearing deep in verticals that are a vortex. Feigning purpose, purposefully feigning, all with the bonus of the bogus.

And yet there is an awakening, and we are on the cusp of a reckoning. Clearly, I come from a journalistic background where Dog Bites Man is never a story. Man Bites Dog is certainly a story. Bytes Dog Man — that is the story.

Editing is agonising, fretting over facts, it’s not virtue-signalling or confusing the ephemeral and the eternal. Unless we can tell the difference between the meaningful and the meaningless, the ­material and the immaterial, we will be lost in a labyrinth of illogic; we will be Jack Nicholson in the final scene of The Shining, fevered, frenetic and, ultimately, frozen ­fatally in our tracks.

Almost 12 years ago, as editor of The Times, I gave evidence to a House of Lords committee: “Facts are incidental if not accidental, and the problem that we have as a society is that there is a significant number of people who have grown up in a different information environment … surrounded by much more information but whose provenance is not clear … The rumours will be believed, the fiction will be thought of as fact and the political agendas, among other agendas, will be influenced by interest groups who are coming from some quite strange trajectory to issues based on collective understanding that is founded on falsity.”

So it shouldn’t surprise us that there are problems with provenance and opportunities for bad actors to damage democracies.

Thankfully, there is indeed a more contemplative crew of contemporary politicians and regulators not merely dazzled by the digital or falling for the fashionable — they are able to divine the difference between artificial intelligence and the artifice of intelligence. Let’s be very clear — the digital world has brought manifold benefits, in choices and chances, in efficiency and efficacy. It is core, not a coda. And because it’s core we need to be conscious of consequences, and not diss dissent as has happened for too long. At last we are discussing more seriously the fine lines between engagement and addiction, between repur­posing and piracy and pillage, ­between belonging and bullying, between identity and insecurity, all of which are magnified digitally.

That word reckoning has biblical overtones and so who will ultimately be the cyber Solomon, ensuring that the digital ecosystem develops to its undoubted potential? One certain outcome will be less dominance by a few players whose reach across horizontals and deep into verticals is a fundamental contradiction, whether in content or in commerce. No one wants the reckoning to be a wrecking ball but the digital debris trail is already rather long.

A few facts about the media — more than 1800 US newspapers have closed in the past 15 years — an industry that employed 412,000 people in 2001 had ­declined to 166,000 in 2017. And have the digital natives succeeded where the traditional titles have failed? Err, no; in recent weeks BuzzFeed, Vice and the Verizon digital properties and others laid off more than 2100 people.

The creators are still being slain by the distributors, who are publishers, though they find it hard to pronounce the word. If you are ­intervening to filter out offensive material you’re editing, and if you are editing you should aspire to be a great editor, not ­selective and ­reactive, but proactive. Haphazard curating is not a curative.

Now the Facebook icon may appear to be an approving thumb — but to content creators it’s actually a contemptuous middle finger. Think of how many tens of billions of our pages have incorporated links to Facebook — by the way, a few years ago, we found they were tracking our users even if you didn’t click on the Facebook logo. And so, one complains, and eventually the problem is dealt with. There are no doubt many media sites that are still being tracked by Facebook without even really understanding the extent of the surveillance — we wrote our own code for the Like links and we have to do repeat sweeps because the tracking devices, the bugs, keep turning up, much like at the US embassy in Moscow.

There is generally an understanding in business that connections lead to partnerships lead to relationships with responsibilities — and that’s the implied social contract, but digital relationships very quickly descended into ­abusive relationships. Serial cheating, digital denials, haughtiness, smugness, playing content creators for suckers who don’t understand the ecosystem. Allowing rampant ­piracy, sometimes actually ­encouraging it; it was core to the business model for some, not all. It’s not a compliant culture — it’s a complaint culture. You complain about the most obvious, egregious, outrageous abuse and these companies may eventually be compliant. But complaint compliance is neither sincere nor a sustainable strategy.

Sundar Pichai at Google is a reason for hope. The end of first-click free, second click fatal, was significant for every single subscription site around the world. And that is the point of our advocacy — and it’s not just for The Times or The Sun or The Wall Street Journal or HarperCollins. We want the landscape to change, for all creators to have more viable models, which will certainly suit us but also surely benefit the societies in which we operate.

I’ll just highlight one more ­example of extreme egregiousness: Amazon book summaries — or scammaries if you like. These noxious weeds started sprouting on Amazon in the US in recent months — a company with the most sophisticated cloud computing network, an acknowledged leader in AI and content customisation was seemingly taken un­awares by these blatant rip-offs. Thankfully, the company has promised to take action — complaint compliance — though it was clearly linking them to Kindle — Kindle subscriptions — and some were even “Best Sellers”.

Thankfully, legislators are awake to the commercial and ­social impact of dominant digital platforms that are wildly successful, with the emphasis on wildly as in the Wild West. Even the woke awoke to the dangers. Now there is little virtue in victimhood, and regulators are generally not our first port of call, but in these storm-tossed, turbulent, tumultuous tech times, a safe harbour in Brussels is better than a watery grave.

But, more significantly, we are transforming News Corp, whose composition, though not its sense of purpose, has changed rather significantly since the creation of the new company in 2013.

The segment breakdown, by revenue and, particularly, EBITDA, shows how significant digital real estate and book publishing have become for the company. That ­reflects the two most significant acquisitions we have made during that period: Move Inc, the parent of Realtor.com in the US, and Harle­quin, the parent of Mills & Boon. Through REA in Australia, we have acquired ­iProperty, the large digital real ­estate company in East Asia, and we also have the largest stake in Elara, which operates PropTiger, Makaan.com and housing.com in India.

These numbers exclude the full impact of the recent consolidation of Foxtel in Australia, which clearly increases the role of subscriptions v advertising and lessens the share, but not the importance of, our newspapers. For example, Dow Jones, parent of The Wall Street Journal, now has about 3.2 million subscribers, an increase of 38 per cent from the first quarter of 2015, and digital accounted for more than 60 per cent of those subscribers. In terms of profitability, in fiscal 2018, our total segment EBITDA crossed the $US1 billion mark for the first time, compared to $US688 million in fiscal 2013.

But our success comes amid a carnage-strewn media field and should not diminish the responsibility, commercial and social, of Big Digital. These companies naturally love the idea of outsourcing responsibility and insourcing money; they are cool, cutting-edge companies and that very coolness has often seduced the susceptible — as GK Chesterton said: “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies ­because they become fashions.”

The digital dilemma is the ­result, in part, of the self-certified idealism of the Silicon Valley and Seattle set; they devoutly believe they are connecting people and ­informing them, even though some of the connections become conspiracies and the information, at least that which has provenance, has been too often skimmed without concern to intellectual property rights.

Clearly our interests are vested and we believe in the purpose of the company that Rupert Murdoch built. If you expect passivity and politic politeness in the face of the online onslaught, well, as ­Mencius sagely observed, that is like climbing a tree to find a fish. We will be dogged on digital as long as Bytes Dog Man.

Robert Thomson is the chief executive of News Corp. This is an edited version of his speech Big Digital: After the Awakening, the Reckoning at the Media and Telecoms 2019 & Beyond conference in London this week.