Google, Facebook and Apple have too much power and are engaging in anti-competitive practices that are having a detrimental effect on journalism, News Corp Australia has told the competition regulator.

“Digital platforms impose restrictive contract terms and engage in aggressive mergers and acquisitions in order to neutralise emerging competition and extend their market power,” Australia’s biggest media company said in a submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry.

The ACCC chairman, Rod Sims, has said consumers are concerned about the survival of quality news media as well as the harvesting of their data by dominant digital platforms.

News Corp said legislative change might be required to stop the digital giants swamping local news organisations, and proposed an algorithm review board to “remedy algorithmic distortions”.

Its submission said Facebook and Google directly influenced about three-quarters of internet traffic, “exerting a strong influence on how readers access and engage with News Corp Australia’s content”.

“Prior to the advent of digital platforms, the creation of news and journalism followed a virtuous circle whereby readership drove subscription revenue, which drove advertising spend, which, in turn, drove investment in content,” the submission said.

“While digital platforms have had some positive impacts, they must be balanced against the significant negative impacts. Fundamentally, digital platforms have undermined this virtuous circle by treating news as an add-on to the consumer-facing services and showcasing as much content for free as possible. As consumers gravitate to the platforms so too do advertisers, further undermining the sustainability of publishers’ business models.”

Australia has lost about 3,000 journalists’ jobs since the growth of digital platforms escalated about 10 years ago, according to the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance submission, one of 57 published on Thursday.

The job losses have come at a significant cost to media companies – Fairfax Media, publisher of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, has spent $490m on redundancies in the past 10 years.

It now has 3,917 full-time journalist positions compared with 7,126 a decade ago.

About 1,400 positions have been shed at News Corp’s Australian titles during the same period.

Fairfax has echoed the concerns of its biggest newspaper competitor, saying its advertising revenue for the capital city mastheads has shrunk dramatically since 1999: from $800m to $225m, without taking into account the effects of inflation.

According to Fairfax’s submission, Google and Facebook captured three-quarters of Australian online advertising expenditure in 2016 and could capture 84% of the global digital ad spend in 2017, excluding China.

Fairfax said Google and Facebook should take their share of responsibility for fake news and filter bubbles, and the consequent impact on social cohesion and democracy.

“It is our assessment that the role played by digital platforms today is not entirely dissimilar to the traditional role of publishers as controllers of physical distribution networks,” Fairfax said.

“Just as publishers are required to take responsibility for the content accessible through their products, platforms should be responsible for the content they amplify and distribute.”

News Corp criticised the strategies employed by the digital platforms, including undermining paywalls with free content or the promotion of free content that has been repurposed from exclusive articles behind a paywall.

The news agency Australian Associated Press said in its submission it had lost clients and the impact on the business had resulted in bureaus being closed and reporters losing jobs.

“For AAP the changing commercial dynamics have resulted in the loss of clients, specifically broadcasters, who have cancelled AAP subscription services worth hundreds of thousands of dollars because in the words of one TV media executive: ‘We just Google it’,” it said.

In its submission, Facebook said it was helping journalism by providing a free global distribution service for publishers.