Due to technological and infrastructural advances, established regulatory frameworks on broadcasting and telecommunications are challenged by global services and platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube and Spotify. These challenges have dimensions that both belong to the ‘macro’ spheres of global internet governance, cultural industries and supranational bodies; the ‘meso’ spheres of nation states and national and local regulations and policies; as well as the ‘micro’ spheres of citizens. This paper will include
these three perspectives and will take a point of departure in the celebrated platform YouTube. The reason for this is that YouTube challenges established regulatory frameworks by being a hybrid platform that facilitates convergences between broadcasting, narrowcasting, distribution patterns, different semiotic
expressions, and production and consumption patterns. The user-generated content which is daily produced and distributed on YouTube reveals loopholes in current regulation. These challenge established notions on transmission, content, jurisdiction, producer, consumer, user, audience, platform, as well as
private and public communications. This paper discusses these challenges and relates them concretely to some of the established roles of media and communication policy.

The aim of this paper is therefore to study YouTube as prominent global cultural institution/platform and some of the concrete challenges it inflicts upon national and supranational audiovisual regulation. In order to account for these YouTube will be discussed as a platform of techno-cultural constructs and as socioeconomic structures. What this entails is to be attentive to YouTube as technology, its user-manoeuvrability, its content production and consumption patterns, as well as issues that closely relate to ownership structures, governance and business models (van Dijck 2013). Furthermore, this paper is
interested in perceiving YouTube and regulatory challenges from the viewpoint of algorithmic cultures (Gillespie 2014; Striphas 2015; Beer 2017; Kitchin 2017; Seaver 2017), i.e. to relate some of the challenges of researching and understanding the wider cultural implications of YouTube’s algorithms to audiovisual production and consumption of citizens. In terms of governance, particular attention will be given to the discourses put forward in YouTube’s terms of service, statements of rights and responsibilities and data policy and inspect how these contractual agreements relate to concrete regulation, with the EU’s Audiovisual Service Media directive (and its amendments) serving as the main case. The analysis will make use of Norman Fairclough’s (1992, 2003)
critical discourse analysis as this method is useful in inspecting intertextual and interdiscursive textual relations, orders of discourse, and how these relate to processes of hegemony, power and ideology at a social practice level.