Fox Corporation agreed to buy Roku for about $22bn on 15 June, acquiring device-level data on 100m-plus streaming households. The same week, UK and EU regulators and 31 British publishers moved to wall off their own data from AI scrapers. Two halves of one fight over who owns the inputs that train and target media AI.
Fox's $22bn Roku buy and publishers' legal walls are both bets on one fact: proprietary data, not model capability, is the competitive moat.
Fox Corporation agreed to buy Roku for about $22bn on 15 June, gaining device-level viewing data from more than 100m streaming households and never once naming AI as the reason.
United StatesFox Corporation agreed on 15 June to buy Roku for $22 billion, gaining device-level viewing data from more than 100 million streaming households. The deal pays $160 per Roku share and is expected to generate $400 million in annual cost savings.
Fox One, Fox's new streaming service, launched on 11 June with AI-personalised dashboards for the World Cup. The Roku acquisition supplies the household data that makes those AI features commercially valuable to advertisers.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google on 3 June to give news publishers tools to withhold their content from AI search, the first binding order of its kind.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google on 3 June to give news publishers tools to opt out of having their content used in AI Overviews, AI Mode and model training, and to add clear source links inside AI search results. The CMA cited measurable publisher traffic falls since AI Overviews launched.
No regulator had previously made such a requirement binding. The practical effect depends on a compliance Deadline the CMA has not yet published.
The Movement for an Open Web signed 31 UK publisher sites to contracts charging AI crawlers £500 per scraped article, enforced through small-claims court rather than copyright law.
The Movement for an Open Web launched Search-Only Contracts on 15 June, signed by 31 UK publisher sites including Trusted Reviews and road.cc. The scheme charges AI crawlers £500 per article copied without permission, enforced through England's online small-claims court for a £50 filing fee with no lawyer required.
Whether it works legally depends on whether English courts accept that an AI crawler is bound by a website's terms. No test case has been filed yet.
The US Justice Department cleared Paramount Skydance's roughly $110bn purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery on 12 June, the first of several gates the deal still has to pass.
The US Department of Justice cleared the merger of Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros. Discovery on 12 June, valuing the deal at roughly $110 billion. The combined company would hold CNN, HBO Max, the Warner Bros. studio and Paramount+.
Three clearances remain: the FCC must approve because the combined company would be nearly half foreign-owned, the EU has until 14 July to rule, and state attorneys general could still sue. No AI strategy has been announced for the merged entity.
France Televisions disclosed on 11 June the named AI vendors it ran live at Roland-Garros, the opposite of the unnamed generative layers US streamers will not discuss.
France Televisions, the French public broadcasting group, disclosed on 11 June the full AI stack it used to produce Roland-Garros tennis coverage, naming Decart's Lucy 2.0 model for real-time video transformation, Gracia AI for volumetric 3D video and Topaz Labs for remastering.
Most broadcasters keep their AI vendor choices private. France Televisions' named-vendor disclosure sets a transparency standard that other European public broadcasters may face pressure to match, with the EU's AI content-marking rules taking effect on 2 August.
The European Commission finalised its Code of Practice on marking AI-generated content on 10 June, completing a rulebook that applies from 2 August with no media company yet signed.
BelgiumThe European Commission finalised rules on 10 June requiring AI-generated content to be labelled, applying from 2 August 2026. Companies can sign up voluntarily now; signing lets them show regulators they are meeting EU AI Act obligations. AI systems already deployed before 2 August have until December 2026 to comply.
Zero EU broadcasters or media companies had signed at finalisation on 10 June. the Commission is expected to make the rules mandatory if voluntary uptake stays low, following the same path as its 2018 disinformation code.
Lionsgate extended its equity stake in generative-AI firm Runway on 12 June, choosing partnership over the acquire path Fox took and the build-and-rent path Netflix runs.
Lionsgate extended its equity stake in Runway on 12 June to co-develop short episodic series from its film and TV library, building on a 2024 partnership that trained a custom Runway model on Lionsgate's roughly 20,000-title catalogue. Lionsgate injected no fresh cash and disclosed no terms for the extension.
Lionsgate vice-chair Michael Burns described the arrangement as an iterative process. Runway holds a $5.3bn valuation and counts Netflix and the BBC among its media clients, but Lionsgate has not named a distribution platform for the planned series.
The New York State Assembly passed bill A11292 on 5 June requiring AI web crawlers to disclose their identity or face penalties of $15,000 a day.
New York State's lower legislature passed a bill on 5 June requiring AI web crawlers to identify themselves truthfully or face fines of $15,000 per day. The bill still needs to pass the state Senate and be signed by the Governor to become law.
The bill matters because publishers cannot charge or block AI crawlers they cannot identify. Mandatory identification is the legal infrastructure that makes per-article billing schemes, including the UK's new publisher contracts , practically enforceable.
Escalating. The EU Code of Practice's 2 August application date is the nearest hard deadline and the most likely first mover: a major European broadcaster signing before then will validate the Code's voluntary pathway; zero signatories by 31 July will accelerate the Commission's mandatory-conversion track, which replicated in 18-24 months the 2018 Disinformation Code's trajectory. The specific trigger to watch is the EU's ruling on Paramount-WBD by 14 July: if the Commission requires structural remedies on European streaming assets, it establishes an intervention precedent that extends beyond merger control to data-concentration concerns across the media-AI pipeline. The FCC's foreign-ownership ruling on Paramount's 49.5% figure carries parallel significance for US broadcast regulation. Neither outcome is decided; both are dated.
AI-assisted, human-edited under the editorial responsibility of Bannermedia Ltd. Reviewed by Ed Woodcock on 17 June 2026. Editorial standards.
