The fight with Big Tech is about shared truth not copyright

AG Sulzberger used his keynote at the World News Media Congress in Marseille on Monday to plead the New York Times’ case against OpenAI calling the exploitation of journalism an “original sin” of generative AI and “a brazen theft of intellectual property.”

Read cynically, the speech was just the latest round of public negotiations with OpenAI, which obliquely disputed Sulzberger’s legal argument on the same stage 24 hours later.

More optimistically, the speech is an invitation for journalism to lean into a more sophisticated critique of how big tech is breaking the information ecosystem that binds democracy together. That is a discussion focused on societal good, not publisher rights, and it is a fight journalism can win by centering and standing with the communities it serves.

Sulzberger, co-author of the New York Times 2014 “Innovation Report,” accused the tech platforms not just of stealing content, but more critically of breaking the social contract between Silicon Valley, journalism, and communities. That earlier compact was embodied by companies like Google, which aggregated news but still drove significant traffic back to publishers - supporting the funding and creation of more journalism.

He told a packed auditorium at the Palais du Pharo (the Palace of the Lighthouse) that journalism is a knowledge creator and a public good, while tech platforms are increasingly “overtly parasitic,” capturing reader attention, diverting the economic value of news, and harming the civic health of local communities in the process.

That argument explicitly mirrors critiques by AI-critical academics like Shoshana Zuboff, Safiya Noble, and Ruha Benjamin. They argue, respectively, that tech giants have adopted the "expropriation" of value from users and creators as a baseline business strategy; that they commodify news into algorithmic feeds engineered for ad revenue rather than knowledge; and that this centralization of information control and corporate power ultimately strips communities of shared truth and democratic agency.

In that frame, the offense is not web scraping, but Silicon Valley’s abandonment of any pretense of civic responsibility to society itself and the institutions that inform it.

By shifting the rhetoric from copyright law (which journalism might lose on the merits) to civic duty (to which the tech giants are allergic), journalism can align its health with that of the communities it serves. The fight becomes less about tech monopolies infringing on copyright, and more about society defending its right to a shared truth.