To inform how we think about EU media law in the future, this chapter traces the understandings of harm evident in EU media laws, their proposal documents, and explanatory notes since the 1989 Television Without Frontiers Directive. It identifies a shift from concern with individual harm from exposure to content, to addressing a variety of sources of harm to individual consumers, collectives, and societal systems. It demonstrates that a link between assumptions about control over risk and responsibility remains persistent and shows how responsibility for preventing harm has been increasingly distributed among various actors as changes in the technology and design of services and in the harms being addressed have affected control over the risk. This chapter argues that future thinking in EU media law needs to focus on how the institutional architecture can support effective cooperative responsibility, including addressing imbalances of power and information asymmetries.

The Television Without Frontiers Directive, introduced in 1989, was the EU’s first regulatory instrument under the audiovisual media policy, aiming to facilitate the circulation of television services throughout the Union. Since then, the audiovisual landscape has evolved significantly, with technological advancements and market shifts prompting revisions of the directive. In 2007, the scope of the directive was expanded to include video-on-demand services (e.g. Netflix), transforming the directive into the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). In the years that followed years, influencers – creators of user-generated content on video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok – became established sources of audiovisual entertainment, information, education, and commercial communication. Today, they are in effective competition with traditional television and video-on-demand platforms. The most recent revision of the AVMSD in 2018 acknowledged this by no longer automatically excluding user-generated videos from the directive‘s scope. Despite this update, the regulatory framework remains deeply rooted in the twentieth-century media ecosystem, which was characterised by spectrum scarcity and television broadcasters as gatekeepers. This leads to challenges in applying and interpreting the AVMSD, hindering its ability to effectively achieve its policy goals.