In the 1970s, countries of the Non-Aligned Movement pushed for a New World Information and Communication Order — an explicit challenge to Western dominance of international news flows. It failed, largely due to opposition from the US and UK, who saw it as a threat to press freedom. But the question at its core has never gone away.
Today, the landscape has shifted but not resolved. The global Microsoft outage affecting Outlook, Teams and 365 services is a reminder of how dependent the entire world — including the Global South — is on a handful of Western tech platforms for basic communication and infrastructure. The concentration of information power has moved from news agencies to cloud providers, but the asymmetry remains.
The structural question
The Al Jazeera piece revisits this history not as nostalgia but as context. The NWICO debate was about who gets to frame the world’s stories, which voices get amplified, and whose interests shape global narrative. Those same questions now apply to AI training data, search algorithms, and platform moderation policies — all overwhelmingly controlled by Western firms.
What makes this relevant today is that the tools for telling the world’s news are also the tools for running its economy. When a single company’s outage can halt email, meetings and document access across continents, the information order is no longer just about journalism. It is about infrastructure, sovereignty and resilience.
The Global South’s early challenge to Western news dominance was dismissed as impractical. But the underlying concern — that concentrated information power distorts understanding and concentrates influence — is more urgent than ever, even if the battleground has moved from wire services to data centres.