However, for many people watching, including die-hard fans at WACC’s general secretariat, it will be hard to escape the feeling that something essential about the game may have been lost along the way.

At its heart, football is perhaps the most democratic game humanity has invented. All it requires is a ball, a patch of ground, and a few friends. It is played in the streets of Montevideo, on the beaches of Accra, in the narrow alleys of Naples, and on the dusty lots of Kathmandu. It is a game of neighbourhoods: children play on the corner, neighbours gather to watch and share a drink, and rivalries form between barrios.

In this sense, football fosters something precious: belonging, shared meaning, a local social fabric, and healthy competition. For Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, whose book El fútbol a sol y sombra (Soccer in Sun and Shadow) is one of football’s greatest chronicles, the essence of the game was playing for the pure joy of playing, the way a child plays with a balloon. He even dedicated his book to children he once met coming home from a match, singing that whether they won or lost, they had fun all the same.

But Galeano also told the other story of the sport. He showed how football became “a sad journey from pleasure to duty” as the game became an industry where profit became central.

This year’s World Cup illustrates this point like no other tournament so far. For the first time, FIFA has introduced dynamic pricing, and tickets for the final were reselling through FIFA’s own system for around USD10,000, with prices going for much higher through informal reselling markets.  The pricing practices provoked such outrage that the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey even opened a joint investigation into the matter.

Also, this year’s tournament will also be a tournament marked by immigration enforcement, with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) having arrested at least 167,000 people in and around the 11 US host cities between January 2025 and March 2026, and more than 120 civil rights organizations issuing a travel advisory warning that fans, players, and journalists could face serious rights violations during matches in the United States.

From WACC’s perspective, the story of football holds up a mirror to the power dynamics surrounding today’s communication ecosystem. The late Michael Traber, a Swiss communication and journalism scholar and WACC laureate, argued that communication is inscribed in human nature. For him, language is the shared house in which we live and communication a human need “as basic as food, clothing and shelter.”

Traber was convinced that without communication, there is no community. There is no talking to your neighbour, no knowing what is happening in your town, no coming together around common ideas, no acting collectively to meet shared concerns.

In this regard, communication, like street football, is how social fabric gets woven, how belonging and meaning are made at the most local and human level. And, like football, communication has been hijacked by a commercial, for-profit logic.

Media systems that should bring people together and act in the public interest are now designed to capture our attention and sell it to advertisers. Digital platforms and their obscure algorithms reward outrage and polarization instead of promoting social cohesion and belonging. Much of today’s media landscape does not help communities build shared meaning from the ground up. Rather, it replicates power dynamics and turns the most human of processes into a machine for selling.

For WACC, the parallel with football is clear. In both cases, something that belongs to everyone has been captured, commodified, and sold back to us, and in forms that no longer build community.

However, neither story has to end this way. In his writings, Galeano recalled several moments of resistance to the dominant profit-driven model, like the famous case of the Brazilian club Corinthians, led by the mythical footballer Sócrates, that was run democratically by its players in the early 1980s.

Communication has its equivalent examples of resistance, like the hundreds of community radio stations, feminist communication collectives, and digital rights groups that WACC has spent decades supporting, and whose work is pivotal for democracy and social justice.

These experiences prove that another logic is possible, one where communication organized around community rather than profit, participation rather than consumption, and dialogue rather than confrontation becomes the norm.

Therefore, while we at WACC will be watching the World Cup, we will also try to remember that football belongs to the street much like communication belongs to the community. Recovering this grassroots, neighbourhood-based, profoundly human understanding of communication is critical not only for democracy but also for building a life that is worth living where we can all flourish.

We hope you will join us in reclaiming communication – and football for that matter! – as a common good.

Top image: (left) Children playing soccer in northern Ethiopia. Photo by Ericjohnsonvik/CC BY-SA 4.0. (right) A member of the Pickwe Ikh Indigenous community in Colombia during training in communication and free technologies. The Common School, hosted by WACC partner PAKKIRU, equipped communities to document the environmental and social impact that mining and similar activities have on their territories. Photo by PAKKIRU.

The Internet is the world’s digital lifeline. For the approximately 5.6 billion people connected to the Internet (some 70% of the global population), access is essential.

The entire Internet cannot be switched off, but governments and other actors can temporarily disrupt or restrict access by shutting down major server providers, filtering traffic, manipulating routing systems, and even sabotaging infrastructure. This is censorship.

At the time of writing, there have been 107 Internet shutdowns around the world since September 2024. Top of the league is India, followed by Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Pakistan, Algeria, and Iran.

The Washington Post (16 September 2025) reported on the situation in Afghanistan, noting that, “For many Afghan women, the internet has been an escape amid increasingly draconian restrictions following the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in 2021.”

Previously, according to the Post, “many women attended online classes, learned foreign languages with the help of e-books and traded cryptocurrencies in the hope of becoming financially independent. Some have tried to make up for the closing of movie theaters, the shuttering of gyms for women and the banning of music by turning to YouTube videos.”

All that has changed. The Taliban’s Internet shutdowns aim to silence women and curtail their aspirations. According to The Guardian (23 September 2025), “The Taliban leadership is reportedly not only considering cutting broadband services but also extending the ban to internet services offered by telecommunications companies, which would stop people getting online using mobile data.”

The USA doesn’t do shutdowns – at least, not yet. But the Trump Administration has concocted its own version of criminalising public communication and censoring free speech. It conducts surveillance against people and groups that disagree with its policies, screening social media for protest and dissent.

Trump is also prone to suing media companies he has accused of bias, including CBS, ABC, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission held up the $8 billion merger of the media companies Skydance and Paramount in part because of alleged news distortion at Paramount’s subsidiary CBS. The merger was approved only after Paramount settled a case with Trump related to an interview CBS broadcast with former Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Silencing and censorship have become weapons of mass subjugation. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube played a critical role in the Middle East pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring. They enabled activists to organize protests, share information and footage of government repression, and raise global awareness of the ongoing events. Since then, such protests have come to depend on the Internet which – in retaliation – governments have increasingly sought to control.

Crucially, the Internet is a digital enabler of the right to assembly and association enshrined in Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as in other rights-based instruments. Article 20 facilitates Article 19 (guaranteeing freedom of opinion, expression, and the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas regardless of frontiers) – but both were drawn up before the digital era.

Digital justice imagines a rights-based world that seeks to ensure equitable, democratic, and humane governance of technology to prevent harms and to promote equality for all. It must now include measures to outlaw Internet shutdowns as a form of censorship inimical to democracy.

Photo: SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

A tech mogul and an asylum seeker trying to enter the US have the same right to freedom of expression. But in practice their voices have very different levels of public influence, which ultimately undermines the asylum seeker’s ability to have their concerns shape public policy.

This is why we need a separate right to communicate – or a set of communication rights – that would tackle communication injustice to protect democracy and human rights. And we need it now more than ever before

Nowhere was this more evident than at U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration last week.

That day, the leaders of the world’s major tech companies, from Amazon to Meta to X to Alphabet, sat in the U.S. Capitol next to Trump family members and in front of his cabinet nominees. They have direct control over much of our personal data, can manipulate the information we consume, and influence how we communicate through their obscure algorithms. Their alignment with the political project of the U.S. far-right was crystal clear.

Any illusion of Big Tech as a force for democratization and genuine citizen participation died that day. It is now evident that these companies not only support an agenda that denies climate change, is rooted in white supremacy, and seeks to undermine women’s rights, but that their only true motivation is money. Profits over the public good, even if the – our – world burns to the ground.

How can we respond?

• First, now that the interests of Big Tech are clear for everyone to see, we must invite more people and movements to join the fight for democratic tech and rights-based communication.

• Second, we must continue to articulate an alternative vision, as WACC and its civil society allies have been doing in 2024 and 2025 in relation to the Global Digital Compact and the 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+20). This vision must be rooted in the notion of communication and information as human rights – not as merchandise – and must work to integrate the voices and knowledge of the millions of people who are still being silenced today.

• And third, we need new allies. As civil society and social movements, we simply do not have the tools and power to turn the alternative vision we are developing into reality. We need the backing and support of states, or blocks of states like the EU or African Union, to establish viable alternative technology and media ecosystems that truly uphold our rights and are not motivated by profit.

Photo: Shutterstock AI

The sport is regulated by FIFA at the global level and groups like CONMEBOL and UEFA at the regional level, entities which have grown so powerful that in some cases they have even managed to change domestic regulations for their benefit.

As part of their regulatory efforts, the bodies that govern football have made every effort to “depoliticize” the game, going as far as to issue hefty fines to players and clubs displaying political messages.

All of this of course while selecting countries with terrible human rights records to hold their tournaments. And while regulating political speech on the pitch sort of makes sense to ensure inclusion, football ultimately belongs to all of us and trying to obscure its political, race, and class dimensions will always be futile.

Last week, the modern form of the game seems to have shed its politically sanitized and pro-corporate clothes when several leading players of the French men’s national football team, which was competing in the UEFA EURO 2024 in Germany until it was eliminated by Spain last week, took a public stance against the far right. Players like Kylian Mbappé and Jules Koundé issued public declarations against the Rassemblement National, a political movement with deep roots in the fascist Front National party, that was leading in France’s legislative elections.

The Rassemblement National was ultimately defeated in the second-round election on 7 July. This was thanks in part to the efforts of these players who called for a national grassroots movement to stop the far right from winning power, a development which would have been a catastrophe for France’s efforts to advance social and climate justice.

As part of their calls against right-wing extremism, these remarkable football players, most of whom are racialized and grew up in low-income neighbourhoods across France, called for a country that would uphold diversity as a key principle.

In doing so, these players joined the many others who have used their position to call for social justice, promote democracy, and denounce anti-rights rhetoric. Some of these include Spain’s Jenni Hermoso’s struggle against sexual assault following the 2023 Women’s World Cup, Brazil’s Sócrates’s resistance against military dictatorship in his country in the 1980s, and Ukraine’s 1942 Dynamo Kiev squad who defied the Nazis.

WACC salutes the French players for using their right to free expression, one of the most fundamental communication rights, to take a stand for democracy, inclusion, and human rights. May others in similar positions follow their lead as the world struggles with the multiple crises of war, climate change, gender-based violence, and xenophobic rhetoric.

Alternatively, Web3 may be what everyone is waiting for. It’s about giving users more control over their Internet activity and data.

At present, people interact with the web and generate data that companies use for marketing and for creating new money-making platforms. Companies also sell the data to third parties. Consequently, people have little say over where their data goes and how it is used. To be honest, many don’t care and are seemingly happy to leave matters there.

Fans of Web3 technology say it will offer a new, decentralized phase of the web run by ordinary people and communities instead of global entities like Facebook and Google. But as the concept has gained ground, the tech giants have been taking note and they want in. Meta, owner of Instagram and Facebook, has filed multiple trademark applications for Web3 software. Spotify is seeking Web3 experts. Microsoft is backing Web3-based start-ups. Many ordinary people are wary of this influx of Big Tech money, seeing it as a way of hijacking the Web3 dream.

The Web3 Foundation believes in an internet where users own their own data, not corporations; global digital transactions are secure; and online exchanges of information and value are decentralized.

Web3 stores information in virtual digital wallets. Individuals use these wallets to tap into Web3 applications, which are run on blockchain technology. When a user wants to disconnect from an application, they simply log off, disconnect their wallet and take their data with them.

Web3 is built using decentralized blockchains – the shared ledger systems used by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether. For this reason, some critics think it is little more than a rebranding effort for crypto or a dystopian vision of a pay-to-play Internet, in which every activity and social interaction remains a financial opportunity.

In a keynote speech at Stanford University (21 April 2022), former President Barack Obama criticised today’s tech landscape. “One of the biggest reasons for the weakening of democracy is the profound change that’s taken place in how we communicate and consume information,” he said. “Do we allow our democracy to wither, or do we make it better? That is the choice.”

Web3 may be the current future of the Internet. But even community platforms will have to confront the same tensions between public and private, free speech and hate speech – even if the scales of power and ownership are being tilted back toward creators and users. Whatever version comes next, the democratic values of liberty, equality, and justice, with independent public institutions balanced by an active and informed civil society, remain paramount.

Image: nutbun/shutterstock

Chile, a country known for being among the most prosperous and politically stable countries in Latin America over the past 30 years, is at a crossroads. And like at every crossroads, there are challenges, but also countless opportunities.

Following months of street protests in late 2019, which left tens of deaths and thousands of injured, the country entered a period of intense national debate about its economic model, whether it should attempt to establish a European-like welfare state, and individual liberties such as the rights of sexual minorities.

This debate eventually led to the establishment of a constitutional assembly in July of this year that will have the task of drafting a new constitution to replace the one passed in 1980 under the military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. The new constitution is expected to strengthen basic rights such as the right to healthcare and the right to education, and to reform the pension system, all of which have been governed by a market-friendly logic for years that forced most Chileans to live in precarity despite decades of sustained macroeconomic growth.  The new constitution might also be the start of a new paradigm on the state’s relations with Indigenous Chileans, particularly the Mapuche nation.

Nevertheless, the presidential election that is currently unfolding in that country is shedding light on just how divided the country remains, and is pouring salt on old wounds. On the one hand, right-wing candidate José Antonio Kast is proposing familiar market-friendly policies such as lowering corporate taxes, reducing the size of the public sector, enhancing support to security forces. His candidacy has also sparked fears that Chile might revert back to its authoritarian past since Kast has shown sympathy for the military dictatorship that governed Chile between 1973 and 1990, and during which thousands were killed, tortured, and disappeared. On the other hand, 35-year old left-wing candidate Gabriel Boric is advocating for greater autonomy for regions outside Santiago, better conditions for working people, a universal healthcare system, and efforts to address gender inequality.

Given this particularly critical context, in which both the state’s long term structures and the next government’s priorities are at play, many are encouraging Chileans to stand up for human rights, democratic governance, and social justice, and to capitalize on opportunities for long term progressive change.

In terms of communication rights, Chilean news media are highly concentrated in the hands of a few corporate actors, notably El Mercurio and Grupo Copesa, which undermines media pluralism and meaningful citizen participation in the media ecosystem. Furthermore, the public media sector is notably weak, and the community media sector was only regulated for the first time in 2010 after decades of public pressure. In this context, both the constitutional assembly and the soon-to-be-elected government have an opportunity to advance a view of communication as both a public good and a human right that underpins democracy. There is also a major opportunity to advance key digital rights such as the right to connectivity and to democratic and transparent data protection through constitutional frameworks, legislation and public policies.

It is also worth noting that Chile sits on vast reserves of mineral resources such as copper and lithium, both of which will be absolutely critical for the green energy transition and are likely to generate billions of dollars in revenue for the Andean country over the next few decades. This provides the Chilean people with a unique opportunity to capitalize on these resources in a responsible way.

So, if there’s ever been a time for Chilean society to move towards a model that guarantees people’s basic rights and turns the page on the decades of alienation and ephemeral wealth brought about by neoliberalism, this is it.

Sources:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/4/chile-beautiful-challenge-of-drafting-new-constitution

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/10/pinochet-chile-chileans-polls-19-december-presidential

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/10/pinochet-chile-chileans-polls-19-december-presidential

https://www.pauta.cl/politica/propuestas-programa-gobierno-jose-antonio-kast

http://www.enpoli.com.mx/uncategorized/medios-comunitarios-en-chile-una-herramienta-al-servicio-de-los-pueblos/

https://www.efe.com/efe/america/sociedad/en-chile-no-hay-medios-que-cumplan-roles-publicos-segun-el-portavoz-del-gobierno/20000013-2982826

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/214539

https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/207371500386458722/the-growing-role-of-minerals-and-metals-for-a-low-carbon-future

https://www.azomining.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=70

Photo above: Thousands of protesters gathered in Santiago’s Plaza Italia demanding more investments in public education, health care and pensions. Credit: Abriendoumndo/Shutterstock

To tackle these limitations, a coalition of civil society organisations, communication scholars and practitioners recently launched the Public Service Media and Public Service Internet Manifesto. It calls for safeguarding the existence, funding, and independence of Public Service Media as well as the creation of a Public Service Internet (PSI).

Many are familiar with threats to public service media worldwide and attacks on the kind of investigative journalism that spotlights government corruption and corporate malfeasance. Less well known is the role Big Tech has played in subverting democracy and the Internet – once held up as the great equalizer in terms of communication freedoms. As the Manifesto makes clear, the PSI would:

• Be led by democratic principles – while the contemporary Internet is dominated by monopolies and commerce.
• Be privacy-friendly and transparent – while the contemporary Internet is corrupted by surveillance.
• Engages, informs and supports the public – while the contemporary Internet misinforms and divides the public.
• Puts social needs first – while the contemporary Internet is driven by profit.

Data privacy would be a mantra of the PSI, which would provide role-model practices for fair data processing. PSI software and its contents would also be a common good, reusable for non-commercial purposes.

PSI platforms would be spaces where critical, independent journalists could post high-quality news and where creative professionals could post high-quality programmes that educate, inform, and entertain in formats appropriate to the digital age. In addition, PSI algorithms would be open source and transparent: algorithms “of the public, by the public, and for the public”.

A PSI will require sustainable funding based on several mechanisms such as licence fees, the Nordic model of tax-financed public services, and transnational agreements. This will be crucial to its long-term viability and independence.

Will we need a global body capable of overseeing a Public Service Internet? Most likely, but one that is independent of supranational political obstruction and that consults openly and regularly with civil society.

Ultimately, this is a matter of “design justice”. This is a concept that rethinks design processes to focus on people often marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges that communities face. A PSI based on design justice would also reflect key principles of communication rights in the digital age: accessibility, affordability, and accountability. Bring it on!

In the USA, Hungary, and the Philippines – to cite just three countries – some politicians have labelled media outlets critical of their policies and actions “fake media” or “fake news”. Among others, Russia, Turkey and China openly censor and supress what might be called media dissent or media activism: holding governments, corporations, and their leaders to account.

An online debate organized by Chatham House two weeks ago stressed that independent professional journalism is a cornerstone of good governance and democratic societies. However, despite their vital critical function, public interest media are in chronic decline.

While accelerated digitalization has given rise to new means of publicising events and opinions, the press and news media are facing a number of challenges to fulfilling their role as trusted sources of information and as public watchdogs. In part, this is because in recent years, billions of dollars of advertising have moved from offline to online: from newspapers, magazines and television to the Internet and social media platforms.

As a result, the financial sustainability and survival of independent news reporting – exemplified by The Guardian and Channel Four News (UK), The Washington Post and PBS (USA), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and DW-TV (Germany), Página 12 and Radio Televisión Argentina (Argentina) – are in question.

In addition, the rapid emergence of digital media platforms has enabled civil society to engage both negatively and positively with wide audiences and to exercise a cumulative degree of influence over democratic practices. The rise of algorithms and “clickbait” has also polarized public debate, in which disinformation and misinformation have helped erode trust in traditional and social media alike.

In the face of declining revenue, how to finance public service media? In the USA, the independent news program, Democracy Now! is audience-supported. Since its founding in 1996, this award-winning program has maintained its policy of not accepting government funding, corporate sponsorship, underwriting or advertising revenue.

In response to today’s erosions, some philanthropic foundations and tech companies have set up emergency funds to support the media. However, sustained funding and better global coordination will be needed, especially to ensure that independent media organizations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia stay afloat.

Independent investigative journalism is a form of activism. Without it, democratic accountability goes for nothing and oligarchs and dictators rule the roost.

Photo by Kirill Zharkoy on Unsplash

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A free and independent media sector is one of the cornerstones of what it means for a country to be a liberal democracy. The emergence of the Internet was initially received with much optimism as there was an expectation that it would help democratize media systems, allowing “citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.”[i].

Nevertheless, in recent years, there have been mounting concerns about the impact that Internet-based communication on democracies around the world. “Today, the contribution of free, pluralistic, independent and safe journalism to democracy is under unprecedented stress…there is growing disintermediation of news institutions: politicians use channels other than the media to reach audiences directly, and voters share content directly amongst themselves.”[ii].

These issues are inextricably linked to Internet Governance issues. “Far too few news organizations have been able to find a sustainable model for journalism online, which translates into less revenue and fewer journalists”[iii]. A key element of this equation is the global advertising market, which has seen as shift away from being dominated by media companies, and is now ruled by Internet companies such as Google and Facebook, which together have a market share of 63%- roughly USD $61.6 billion per year. At the same time, global newspaper advertising revenue is expected to decline by USD 23.8 billion a year by 2021.[iv]

It is time for the Internet Governance community to devote more energy to addressing some of these issues. This may include working towards the development of mechanisms for ad revenue sharing or investing in AI technologies that optimize the visibility of credible sources of news. Media viability will not be enhanced in the long run through philanthropic efforts, but rather through accountable and transparent mechanisms that prioritize democracy and human rights.

[i] Diamond, Larry (2010). “Liberation Technology” in Journal of Democracy, July 2010, Volume 21, Number 3. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Diamond-21-3.pdf

[ii] UNESCO (2018). Report on World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development 2017/2018. UNESCO: Paris. in Media for Democracy: Journalism and Elections in Times of Disinformation- Concept Note for World Press Freedom Day 2019. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/concept_note_en_wpfd_2019.pdf  

[iii] Oghia, Michael J. Governing Digital Convergence: An Issue Paper on Media Development and Internet Governance. Global Forum for Media Development. https://gfmd.info/internet-governance/

[iv] Oghia, Michael J. Governing Digital Convergence: An Issue Paper on Media Development and Internet Governance. Global Forum for Media Development. https://gfmd.info/internet-governance/