The numbers AGCOM put on the table
When AGCOM president Giacomo Lasorella presented the Authority's 2026 Annual Report to the Chamber of Deputies on July 14, the headline figures were less about scandal than arithmetic. Online platforms' share of Italian advertising revenue has climbed from 45% in 2021 to 58% today, and when subscriptions and audiovisual sales are folded in, platforms now account for over 46% of total media revenue — up from roughly 32% five years ago. Three companies, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon, together control around 72% of Italy's overall advertising market. Traditional media, meanwhile, is shrinking: AGCOM's data shows a 0.6% dip in overall sector revenue and a 2.9% drop in advertising spend on legacy outlets in 2025.
These are not new dynamics — Italy has watched this shift for a decade — but AGCOM's report is the clearest official acknowledgment yet that the country's media-regulation architecture, built for broadcasters and publishers, is now governing a market that global platforms dominate by scale.
From broadcast regulator to platform overseer
AGCOM's response has been to expand its own remit rather than shrink the market it regulates back to its old boundaries. As Italy's designated Digital Services Coordinator (DSC) under the EU's Digital Services Act, AGCOM now supervises intermediary platforms operating in Italy, coordinates with the European Commission and other national coordinators, and can impose administrative sanctions of up to 6% of a platform's annual worldwide turnover for DSA violations (AGCOM, DSA competence page). The Authority also formalized 14 relevant markets within the "integrated communications system" this year, adding video-sharing platforms, search engines, social networks and online-ad-intermediation services to categories it values and monitors annually alongside traditional broadcast and press markets.
The most concrete new instrument is the Code of Conduct for influencers, adopted by Resolution 197/25/CONS. Under AGCOM's guidelines, any creator with at least 500,000 followers or 1 million average monthly views on a single platform is a "relevant influencer" subject to registration, and disclosure rules on advertising, gifted products and content harmful to minors apply once they cross that threshold — obligations that follow the creator across every platform they use, not just the one where they qualified (AGCOM, Influencer Guidelines and Code of Conduct).
The case for the expansion
The steelman for AGCOM's approach is straightforward: influence has migrated to creators who operate with none of the transparency obligations that bind broadcasters, and Italian consumer-protection law was largely silent on undisclosed sponsorships, filtered body-image content and gambling promotion by creators until the Code of Conduct existed. A regulator whose founding statute predates smartphones cannot credibly claim jurisdiction over a market it doesn't measure. Extending AGCOM's market-monitoring function to video-sharing platforms and ad-intermediation services is also, in principle, the kind of evidence-gathering that should precede — not substitute for — enforcement, and gives Italian policymakers a factual basis that has been largely supplied by the platforms themselves until now.
Where the model strains
The report itself flags a genuine dilemma: AGCOM says it has asked the European Commission to assess whether Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode comply with DSA systemic-risk obligations, given their effect on referral traffic to Italian news publishers, and has convened a standing dialogue table between Google, other platforms and publishers on copyright and pluralism. That is a defensible use of a coordinator's convening power — better than unilateral fines against a feature still being defined. But it also illustrates the risk in AGCOM's expanding brief: DSA enforcement, competition concerns and media-pluralism policy are being routed through the same regulator with the same six-percent-of-turnover stick, and Italy's Regional Administrative Court for Lazio has already questioned, in a case over the Dignity Decree's rigid €50,000 minimum gambling-ad fines, whether flat statutory penalties survive a proportionality test. That question — proportionate to what, exactly, and to whom — is the one AGCOM's own report doesn't yet answer for its platform powers generally.
The influencer registry is the sharper test case. A 500,000-follower threshold sweeps in a wide tier of Italian creators who function as small businesses, not broadcasters, and pairs disclosure obligations most would support (declare an ad, don't misrepresent a filtered photo as unedited) with penalty exposure — reportedly up to €600,000 for child-protection breaches — that is broadcaster-scale for creator-scale operations. AGCOM's own FAQ process suggests the Authority recognizes this: guidance has been repeatedly clarified since the March 2026 rollout, a sign the rules were adopted before their edge cases were fully worked out.
The right instinct, an unproven calibration
None of this argues against AGCOM measuring the market it's now responsible for — that transparency is overdue and, on the ad-revenue numbers alone, justified. The open question is whether an Authority built to license broadcast spectrum and audit newspaper circulation can calibrate proportionate enforcement for a market defined by algorithmic recommendation and creator economics, rather than defaulting to the blunt instruments — flat fines, broad thresholds — that its legacy toolkit was built around. The 2026 report shows AGCOM has the data. Whether it develops the restraint to match will show up in the first influencer sanctions and the first DSA fine, not in this report.