The Competition Commission of South Africa recently released its provisional report on the Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI), providing an assessment of how digital platforms impact the South African media landscape. This inquiry represents one of the most comprehensive investigations globally into how digital platforms impact local media ecosystems. Unlike approaches in other jurisdictions that focus narrowly on copyright or competition law, South Africa’s inquiry connects digital market power to constitutional rights and media diversity. The Commission’s emphasis on vernacular language media and the public broadcaster demonstrates an understanding that media regulation is not just about market efficiency but about ensuring citizens’ access to diverse, quality information in languages they understand.
The proposed remedies are notable for their structural focus—seeking to correct underlying power imbalances rather than simply imposing one-time penalties. By targeting algorithmic design, revenue-sharing models, and data access, the Commission acknowledges that media sustainability requires systemic changes to the digital environment.
Social media, search, AI and advertising
The Commission’s investigation focused on four key areas where digital platforms significantly impact South African media: social media, search engines, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and digital advertising technology. To the Commission’s credit, it held consultations as part of its process for developing the report—with testimonies made by news media companies, media sectoral organisations, regulators, the SA National Editors Forum, media support NGOs, and most of the tech companies.
For social media, the report highlights how platforms like Meta (Facebook), YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok have created unequal bargaining dynamics with media organisations. Meta and X have deliberately deprecated news content and link-sharing, disrupting the typical value exchange where publishers received referral traffic in return for providing content. YouTube’s dominance in video content has particularly affected the public broadcaster, with news publishers receiving only 55% of lower-value programmatic automatic advertising rather than the full value they might generate on their own platforms.
In search, the Commission provisionally found that Google has extracted disproportionate value from news publishers, contributing to the erosion of South Africa’s media ecosystem. The inquiry estimated Google extracted R300-500 million in 2023 from publishers, while simultaneously reducing referral traffic through ‘zero-click’ searches and algorithm designs that favour foreign media over local sources, subscription models over free content, and YouTube over South African broadcasters. These practices have had “an adverse effect on competition” (p3), creating imbalances in bargaining power that degrade the relative prominence of SA media. Without specifying Google as such, it also signals that AI summaries reduce referral traffic to news sites, harming media outlets not included in content deals.
The inquiry also found that AI chatbots and generative AI systems have freely leveraged South African news content for training and development without fair compensation, potentially reducing referral traffic and creating further imbalances in the digital ecosystem. Concurrently, “South African news media continues to provide access to AI web crawlers to scrape their website content for training purposes,” the Commission found, “and as a result appears either ill-informed or ill-equipped to protect their content from AI web crawlers due to the opt-out rather than opt-in requirements” (p 13).
In digital advertising technology, Google’s “super-dominant” (p113) position across the entire advertising stack has suppressed competition and disadvantaged publishers, particularly those producing content in vernacular languages.
Proposed remedies
The Commission’s provisional remedies reflect a progressive regulatory approach focused on addressing structural imbalances. It has an appropriate balance of enabling, as well as restrictive provisions.
Direct compensation: This is the cornerstone of the proposed framework, requiring Google to provide annual payments between R300-500 million to news media organisations (p5). This compensation structure would not only consider content volume but would incorporate considerations for relative needs and contributions to media diversity within the South African landscape.
Algorithmic changes for public interest purposes: Digital platforms would be required to implement algorithmic fairness measures to ensure South African media outlets are not disadvantaged compared to foreign sources. These adjustments would specifically benefit vernacular and community media by ensuring they receive equitable representation in search results and content recommendations.
Advertising revenue sharing: The framework calls for YouTube to substantially increase its revenue-sharing model for news content from the current 55% to a minimum of 70%. Additionally, YouTube would need to extend its monetisation program to include all eligible South African news publishers, expanding access to this crucial revenue stream. A similar target is set for Meta for its in-stream videos.
Data access: To address existing information asymmetries, platforms would be obligated to provide publishers with enhanced user data and insights. This data equity measure aims to level the playing field by giving local media organisations access to the same quality of information that digital platforms possess about content performance and audience engagement.
AI considerations: News publishers would gain significant AI opt-out rights, allowing them to exclude their content from both AI training datasets and automated summary features. For publishers who choose to participate in AI initiatives, alternative monetisation pathways would be established to ensure fair compensation, such as a “1% digital tariff or copyright levy on content used by the AI Large Language Models” (p6).
Fall back regulation: The Commission recommends implementing collective bargaining exemptions that would allow news media organisations to negotiate with digital platforms as a unified bloc. This measure aims to enhance their bargaining power when dealing with tech giants significantly. A digital levy fallback mechanism would be triggered if platforms fail to implement these remedies. This would impose a 5-10% levy on digital advertising revenue, with proceeds directed to a dedicated Media Industry Fund supporting journalism in South Africa.
Implications beyond South Africa
The MDPMI report presents a blueprint for progressive digital regulation that could serve as a model for other similar-sized markets seeking to address imbalances in their media ecosystems. These kinds of imbalances are equally pressing in other African countries, even as markets are smaller and regulatory capacity requires development.
Altogether, this framework stands out for its thoughtful approach to complex digital market challenges. The main goal is to preserve the recommendations and ensure that they anticipate challenges to implementation. Digital platforms have already signalled they will resist these changes, and some remedies will require ongoing monitoring to ensure effectiveness. Nevertheless, the Commission has provided an opportunity for South African media organisations, digital platforms, and civil society to shape these provisional remedies into final recommendations that could fundamentally rebalance digital power dynamics and support a diverse, sustainable media ecosystem that serves South Africa’s democratic and developmental needs.
