Why Journalism Belongs in CADA: Join Submission
The proposal for a Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) never mentions journalism, media freedom, democracy, or freedom of expression. Its fundamental-rights assessment addresses one right – the protection of personal data under Article 8 of the Charter – an oversight that must be rectified before CADA is codified.
That’s the case made in a joint submission to the CADA consultation round by the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) and the Center for Media & Digital Governance (CMDG) with Open Markets Institute.
The stakes are concrete: investigations, confidential sources, and years of reporting increasingly sit on infrastructure controlled by a handful of technology giants. When those companies change their terms, withdraw services, or bow to political pressure, newsrooms can lose access to the tools and material their work depends on. Europe’s ability to sustain independent journalism therefore depends in part on who controls the infrastructure beneath it.
Simply moving servers to Europe will not resolve that dependency. The submission warns against “sovereignty-as-a-service”: Big Tech repackaging its existing products as European and sovereign while retaining control over the systems, contracts, and bundled services that keep customers locked in. Genuine autonomy requires newsrooms to be able to choose providers, combine competing services, and move their archives without losing them.
The CADA offers a chance to build that freedom into Europe’s digital foundations. The submission calls for publicly supported computing capacity at affordable rates for independent media, procurement rules that support smaller providers and open-source alternatives, and a formal role for journalism organisations in shaping the Act’s implementation. There are already models to build on, including the Journalism Cloud Alliance’s community-governed cloud exchange, infratype.
Public investment should help scale infrastructure that protects journalism’s independence – and the public’s ability to hold power to account.