Informational Sovereignty: The Commercial and Geopolitical Risk of Newsroom Dependency on Third-Party Infrastructure in Latin America

Abstract

This article reveals significant market consolidation within the digital infrastructure of Latin American media. Extending the political economy of media literature from ownership to control over underlying infrastructure, it uses a newly constructed database of over 400 data points to analyze the online infrastructure of 18 media outlets across 6 Latin American countries, focusing on 11 key elements of the media stack. Findings indicate that dominant players, such as Alphabet and Meta, pose the greatest commercial risks to the analyzed media. Meanwhile, the U.S. government emerges as the greatest geopolitical risk, with 50–100% of providers across the analyzed elements operating under U.S. law, exposing Latin American media with similar infrastructural profiles to U.S. government policy. The article places these challenges in conversation with historical calls for a New World Information and Communication Order, which underlines that a robust understanding of media autonomy requires infrastructural autonomy.