The Open Markets Institute is a Washington, DC-based anti-monopoly policy nonprofit. It was founded in 2017 after spinning out from New America following internal disputes over Google funding. Its work focuses on platform power, antitrust, the economics of journalism, and AI content-licensing markets.
Center for Journalism and Liberty (CJL)
Open Markets hosts the Center for Journalism and Liberty (CJL) as an in-house initiative focused on the structural economics of journalism in the platform era, extending from earlier search and social-media policy work into the AI content-licensing terrain.
"Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths" report
On April 27, 2026, CJL released "Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths: Mapping the AI Content Licensing Market," which argues that the AI content-licensing market is replicating the structural patterns of search and social media (Source: journalismliberty.org).
The report frames OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google licensing deals with publishers (NYT, WSJ, News Corp, Axel Springer, Reddit, and others) as a second-generation tollbooth structure. It argues that, just as search and social platforms became gatekeepers between publishers and readers, extracting value while degrading publisher economics, AI content licensing locks publishers into asymmetric bilateral deals with platform-scale buyers. According to the report's framing, the NYT v. OpenAI/Microsoft line of bilateral resolution is likely positioned as insufficient to address that structural asymmetry. The report presents an anti-monopoly framing of the AI content-licensing market and stands alongside Pay-per-Crawl (Pigouvian Pricing of Agent Traffic) as a competing structural-response framing.
Relationships
- related: Pay-per-Crawl (Pigouvian Pricing of Agent Traffic), AI Copyright, NYT v. Microsoft, OpenAI et al., AI in Journalism and Media, Aggregation Theory, Lina Khan (anti-monopoly), Anu Bradford (Brussels effect / structural framing).
Sources
- Open Markets Institute / Center for Journalism and Liberty / Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths (April 27, 2026): journalismliberty.org