Speech by Martin Ajdari, President of Arcom, at the presentation of Arcom's strategic project 2026-2028

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President Lafon,
Ladies and Gentlemen of the French Parliament,
Madam President of France Télévisions,
Ladies and Gentlemen of the College,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear friends,

I'm delighted to welcome you to Arcom to present our strategic project for the years 2026-2028.

By way of introduction, I'd like to start with a question and ask you what the following missions have in common:

• the fight agains sports piracy,
• the inclusion of Netflix, Disney and Amazon in the financing of creation, to the tune of over €500 million by 2026,
• age verification on pornographic sites, soon the implementation of digital majority, and more broadly the implementation of DSA in France,
• or the monitoring of artificial intelligence services and support for press neighbor rights negotiations?

These are all Arcom missions. But above all, these are new missions that have been entrusted to it since its creation in 2022 (or that are in the process of being entrusted to it, in legislative texts currently in shuttle), and which are added to the historical missions inherited from the French Superior Audiovisual Council and Hadopi. We have drawn up this strategic plan for the next three years to reflect the diversity, topicality and coherence of all these missions, within a clear overall managerial framework.
Before handing over to management for a full presentation of our objectives, a few words about the intention and ambition that drive us.

Whatever the context, the core of our mission remains the same: to guarantee freedom of expression and the free communication of ideas and works; to contribute to the protection of citizens, especially the most vulnerable; to ensure plurality of information and diversity of creation.

And constantly ensuring a delicate and necessary balance between freedom and protection, which is a pillar of our cultural model, and a condition for the quality of democratic debate.

These core missions remain, but the context in which we must strike this balance is evolving very rapidly, under the effect of a triple mutation: digital, democratic and economic.

First of all, as you all know, developments in digital use are accelerating, especially among youngsters: 15-34 year-olds spend more than 3 hours a day, or almost 2/3 of their audiovisual consumption, on social networks and video-sharing platforms. This development continues and is being renewed by the extremely rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, which 85% of 15-24 year-olds use. This, of course, raises new questions.

Democratic questions, if an empathetic AI tells us who to vote for, as 16% of our fellow citizens are already demanding, according to a study published yesterday by Terra Nova. Questions of intellectual property protection, if we want AIs to be properly remunerated for the content they exploit.
And we can neither avoid these challenges, nor refuse to be included in this transformation, if we want these new tools to be driven or nurtured by content that respects our values and reflects our aspirations.

The second change is the alteration and polarization of the debate on ideas, at a time when there no longer seems to be a consensus on the very meaning and limits of freedom of expression. While some want to silence the voices that disturb them, others claim absolute freedom of expression for themselves (sometimes the same people, not just in the White House, alas).

Online, the manipulation of information is taking place on an unprecedented scale, for the purposes of advertising monetization or political destabilization. The municipal election campaign has given us a glimpse of what we need to prepare for in the coming national elections, from the detection of low-level foreign interference to debates about the real or supposed algorithmic advantage that this or that platform might have offered to this or that candidate.

Third change: the risk of collapse of the economic model of the audiovisual media, which are the pillars of production and diffusion of both information and creation. Just one figure: the weight of the press, TV and radio in the advertising market will fall from more than half in 2019 to around 20% in 2030.

To paraphrase a famous president, the house is on fire... and we can't keep looking the other way, tetanized by controversies over public audiovisuel, important though they may be, but they take up bandwidth that other challenges also sorely need. For there can be no plurality without economically healthy media, no fruitful debate in a digital far west, and no cultural model without copyright protection.

Against this shifting, uncertain backdrop, the ambition of this strategic project is to share our vision and provide benchmarks. It is to make our action more transparent to the public, beyond the role of audiovisuel watchdog to which it is too often reduced. It is also an opportunity to make more explicit our benevolent and demanding support for audiovisual players and, on subjects where debate is sometimes heated, to help unite people around common objectives.

What are the priorities of this project (there are three, corresponding to the 3 axes)?

The 1st priority is to protect the public from the risks to which they are exposed on screens, and first and foremost online. With a particular focus on the protection of minors, which I made a priority as soon as I took office, and which is showing very encouraging initial results in terms of access to pornography (consumption down by almost half). The implementation of the digital majority at the end of the year will also be a major step forward, even if it is far from exhausting the challenges of online safety.

Priority 2: ensure the reliability, independence and plurality of information, where the fight against online information disorders will be a central issue.
Public audiovisuel will also feature prominently, and we will be able to draw on the conclusions of the mission entrusted to Bruno Lasserre, which will be presented on May 29. Finally, before the summer, we will be making our first decision on broader plurality, as defined in our deliberations of July 2024, an issue which I have no doubt will continue to attract attention in the months ahead, in 2027 and beyond.
On these subjects, the commission of inquiry into the gray areas of information launched in the French senate by President Lafon will certainly feed our diagnosis and help us identify innovative solutions.

3rd priority: support the economic competitiveness of audiovisual players, and creativity in the broadest sense. This priority brings together all the objectives that contribute to the resilience and transformation of television and radio, from supporting their business models to the future of their broadcasting models.

It also covers the development, diffusion and protection of works, through the fight against piracy, the inclusion of artificial intelligence in regulation, and the financing obligations of broadcasters. The recent agreement with Amazon, which more than dubs its contribution to European and French-language creation, is a good example of our ambition.

Before letting the CEO go into the details of these objectives, I'd like to highlight a few major challenges.

First point: Television and radio continue to occupy a central and intimate place in the lives of the French. Two-thirds of them listen to the radio, and three-quarters watch television every day, averaging 2 hours 45 minutes for each medium. These volumes are declining, but they are still massive, so there's no question of moving away from our historic mission of ensuring the proper functioning of the audiovisuel landscape and supporting its players. The reorganization of Radio France's frequencies, from assessment to implementation, is just one example.

On the contrary, the legislator has enriched these missions from year to year, in areas such as the environment, public health, gender equality and accessibility for our many disabled fellow citizens. These are all areas in which, despite the difficult economic climate I mentioned earlier, the audiovisual media can boast remarkable results, far beyond what we can observe online.
These results should be recognized and applauded. Indeed, public audiovisual is often at the forefront of these results - an aspect that has been somewhat overshadowed in recent months. That's why we will continue to advocate (dear Delphine, dear Fabrice), for a strong and independent public service, endowed with means that are sustainable and in line with the missions entrusted to it.

These results are also a sign that regulation is bearing fruit. And if preserving the competitiveness of the audiovisual media today requires a more level playing field with the players who compete unfairly with it, it must not take the path of a race to the bottom.

This is the second major challenge: we need to ensure that digital players play their part in the cultural exception and in the quality of information, in the same way as traditional media, and in an appropriate way.

First and foremost, of course, by resolutely implementing the rules specific to digital spaces. In particular, we will deploy in France and support in Europe a faster, more directive and more effective implementation of the regulation on digital services. Investigations and grievance notifications in recent months concerning X, TikTok, Meta and Snapchat - not to mention the first legal sanctions imposed on X - have confirmed the relevance and potential of the principles of the DSR; the next few months must be those of results.

Secondly, by helping to level the playing field between audiovisual and digital players, notably in the (decisive) revision of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, where we will be defending the objective of greater visibility for audiovisual channels in digital spaces, and strengthening requirements for video-sharing platforms, on advertising in particular.

We will also protect the remuneration of online information and creation, for example by controlling the fair level of neighbor rights for the press, if the legislator confirms his intention (dear Erwan Balanant).

The third major challenge is to think in the long term, anticipating the gradual disappearance of DTT frequency-based regulation (or at least of its structuring character), in line with developments in usage.

Of course, this shift will not take place within the timeframe of this strategic project; it's more a matter of a decade. But on the eve of a major political deadline, it's our responsibility to lay the foundations with all the players involved, so as to be a source of proposals and chart a course for the coming years.

The final issue I'd like to stress is that of our means.

The field of digital regulation is infinite, as are the expectations of our fellow citizens. Faced with the new missions entrusted to us since 2022, in particular the deployment of the RSN, we have obtained around twenty additional jobs, far fewer than our main European counterparts. This is not up to the challenges. Several observers, including members of parliament, have already pointed this out.

Of course, we are going to make every effort to redeploy ourselves, lighten some of our control proceedings, develop more effective tools by mobilizing (we too) AI, and to increasingly mobilize, in the service of digital regulation, the sector-specific expertise that Arcom agents have developed in audiovisuel regulation. An internal transformation.

What's more, digital regulation, more than any other, needs to be conceived and deployed as a network, and our role as coordinator of the RSN will require us to constantly deepen our cooperation with all the players involved. First and foremost, with the platforms themselves. The challenge is to empower them.

Secondly, with the public prosecutor / prosecution, Pharos, Viginum, the DGCCRF, and with our essential partners in civil society (researchers, trusted flaggers, associations - I'd like to welcome those present), who also need to be better funded. Finally, at European level - because it's at European level that we can force X or TikTok to develop their model.

And we will continue to deploy our action throughout France, mobilizing the network of local Arcom, the unique fabric of our local media, and actions to educate people about the media and digital citizenship, an essential complement to regulation.

But even if we redeploy ourselves, even if we rely on our partners, we'll need the means to ensure that our action lives up to the expectations of our fellow citizens, as well as to our own ambition.

This ambition is supported by the entire Arcom board, whose members I would like to thank, because our ability to carry out our missions with accuracy, intelligence and independence is based on our daily collegial work.

It's an ambition that has also been served, as I've seen for over a year now, and I'd like to pay tribute to them, by Arcom's staff - with commitment and skill.

Thank you for your attention, and I'll now hand over to the CEO.