The IPPR’s May 2025 policy paper Fair Play: How Competition Policy Can Drive Growth represents a timely and thoughtful intervention in the debate about economic resilience, democratic accountability, and the need for a revitalised regulatory approach to market power. Its central argument—that robust, proactive competition policy is essential for meaningful growth—deserves to be welcomed, particularly as it affirms the vital role of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in protecting against economic concentration and extractive business practices.
The report offers a clear analysis of how excessive market consolidation, especially in digital sectors, entrenches incumbent power and undermines innovation, wages, and the social fabric. Yet these dynamics are just as relevant to the UK’s media landscape, and here the implications of the Media Act 2024 demand urgent attention.
The Media Act has accelerated the consolidation of radio and other media platforms, particularly under the guise of commercial viability and national efficiency. In reality, this has led to a heavily centralised, vertically integrated model in which radio functions less as a system of communication and more as a protection racket. Ownership and control have concentrated in a few hands, while local identity, editorial independence, and pluralism have withered. The original promise of radio as a democratic and cultural institution—responsive to the needs, values and identities of its audience—has been replaced by a commodified infrastructure driven by speculative capital and homogenised content.
This is where the Foundation Economy model provides a vital counterpoint. By reimagining media as part of the shared social infrastructure that supports everyday life, the Foundation Economy calls for competition principles that are local and regenerative, rather than global and extractive. Media should not be judged merely on its profitability or export potential, but on its contribution to place-based identity, civic cohesion, and cultural sustainability. Competition, in this context, is not simply about preventing monopolies—it is about ensuring that the conditions exist for diverse, participatory, and accountable media platforms to flourish at the community level.
The distributionist principles underpinning this approach affirm the importance of economic and social activity taking place at the lowest effective level—neighbourhoods, towns, and cities—protected from manipulation and insulated from abuse of corporate or state power. This reinforces the argument made in Fair Play that competition policy is not an abstraction but a political and ethical necessity, integral to democratic life.
Technological transformation, including the shift to digital and the expansion of AI-enabled media, is reshaping how people communicate and access information. But the direction of this change must be governed by a principle of public purpose. Instead of further empowering centralised content producers and algorithmic gatekeepers, competition policy should facilitate the development of locally rooted, independently governed media ecosystems. It should open space for people to form, build, and sustain their own media platforms—free from state manipulation and beyond the reach of industrialised content production.
To achieve this, competition policy must be redeployed to rebuild media from the middle—that is, from the civic and institutional centre of everyday life where people live, care, participate, and relate. The pursuit of global media markets has undermined cultural democracy, reducing media to a pipeline of commodified stories designed to serve the interests of scale rather than significance. Reinvestment in distributed media ecosystems, supported by fair competition and local regulation, would give people back the power to determine what matters and what is worth sharing.
As Fair Play makes clear, a reformed CMA can be the institutional vehicle for this shift—if it adopts a pro-social, pro-worker, and pro-democracy mandate. In the media sector, this must include a willingness to challenge monopolistic broadcasters, limit vertical integration, and actively support the development of civic media infrastructure through structural presumptions and regulatory innovation.
Ultimately, media must reflect what people care for—their relationships, their places, their shared values and aspirations. A competition policy that fails to address the corrosive dominance of industrialised media platforms will only perpetuate the production of junk content that insists citizens care about what corporate metrics dictate. But a competition policy rooted in foundational and distributionist principles can help restore the conditions for authentic, meaningful, and local storytelling. That is the path to a democratic media future—and it begins not at the margins, but at the middle.