A new campaign, the Media Sovereignty Act is calling for legislation to break up billionaire and offshore control of UK media. The petition behind it was created by Donnachadh McCarthy and is being publicly fronted by campaign director Caspar Hughes.
What is the Media Sovereignty Act asking for?
The campaign is calling for five specific changes: a ban on billionaires monopolising media ownership; a ban on non-domiciled individuals and foreign companies owning UK media outlets; a social media levy, with funding ring-fenced for local independent media and modelled on Australia's approach to making platforms pay for news; a mandatory independent statutory press regulator, of the kind Impress already operates; and a requirement for think tanks that get media coverage to publicly disclose donations as they're received.
The case for all five rests on how concentrated UK media ownership already is. The Media Reform Coalition's most recent "Who Owns the UK Media?" report found that three companies, DMG Media, News UK and Reach, now control around 90% of national newspaper circulation, up roughly 20% since 2014, and that seven of the top fifteen platforms people use to access news sites are Meta, Google or X. That's a hard concentration figure to argue with, even if a five-part legislative remedy is a harder thing to land in one go than the diagnosis is to make.
Hitting 10,000 signatures
The petition passed 10,000 signatures in May, which under parliamentary rules meant the government had to respond. However, the response, published on 26 May, rejected the campaign's core asks. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport addressed each one:
Foreign ownership: already covered by the Foreign State Influence (FSI) media merger regime, which lets the DCMS Secretary of State block or unwind qualifying transactions, though it's not meant to block ordinary overseas investment.
The levy: not under consideration. The government pointed to the existing Digital Services Tax instead, plus a Local Media Action Plan with a Local News Fund worth up to £12 million over two years.
Statutory regulator: no plans to introduce one. The government framed the current self-regulatory system as a deliberate choice to keep the press independent of government oversight.
Think tank donations: left voluntary, on the basis that charity and electoral law already cover the relevant ground.
Notably, the formal petition text never asked for a billionaire ownership cap specifically, only for the foreign ownership ban, the levy, the regulator and the think tank rule, so that part of the campaign's wider ask has yet to get an official answer either way.
With the rejection on record, the petition's next target is 100,000 signatures, the threshold that would force a debate in Parliament. It has currently reached 18,010.
The Australia comparison
The levy proposal also points to Australia's model, where legislation compelled platforms to pay news publishers. That code did produce payments, but Meta has since pulled back from renewing some of the deals, which is the obvious risk for any UK version that relies on negotiated agreements rather than a standing legal obligation.
What happens next
The petition closes on 18 September 2026, which gives the campaign roughly three months to find another 82,000 signatures. Alongside that, it's crowdfunding for YouGov polling on public attitudes to billionaire media ownership specifically, the one ask that fell outside the government's written response, so the polling is partly an attempt to generate the evidence base the petition itself never tested.
Even if 100,000 is reached, a debate doesn't bind the government to anything; however, it’s a chance to put political pressure on a position ministers have already set out in writing. The campaign is also looking to widen its coalition, seeking endorsements from press-freedom and media-reform organisations ahead of any debate.