Competition Commission report on Big Tech and media offers scant hope to beleaguered industry

The Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI) has delivered its final report, some three years in the making, containing remedies aimed at rebalancing a digital ecosystem where news media have become increasingly dependent on — and crushed by —the whims of Big Tech.

In its sights, in particular, were social media platforms and search engines, whose increasing monopoly on both attention and ad spend has helped squeeze already frail newsrooms past breaking point.

Competition Commission analysts have been extremely diplomatic in describing negotiations with the Big Tech players, insisting that most were “forthcoming and engaging”, to quote senior analyst Donnavan Linley.

But the report’s final remedies, arrived at in all but one case with the agreement of the tech companies, make it clear that one of the behemoths was more cooperative than the others.

That is Google, which has been the target of regulators globally lining up to take a swing at the search giant’s advertising monopoly. South Africa is now joining that list, albeit with the resigned awareness that our market is too small to force Google to do anything too dramatic.

The commission openly admitted that South Africa was not important enough for standalone structural reform:

“Structural remedies are unlikely to attract buyers and competition given the small market size… Remedies implemented piecemeal in SA are unlikely to be effective,” it said.

So the commission has opted for a more pragmatic strategy: hitching South Africa’s wagon to remedies Google has already been forced to implement elsewhere.

Google puts (some) money where its mouth is

The most concrete contribution made by Google is its commitment to contribute R688-million to South African media over the next five years, split between small and large publishers and divided into various training funds and initiatives. This is significantly less than the commission proposed in its preliminary report, which mooted a Google bill of R300-million to R500-million a year.

But Google is, nonetheless, the sole Big Tech company that is actually ponying up cash to compensate SA news publishers for the benefit it has derived from news results in its search engine — and deserves some recognition for that.

Perhaps the most ambitious Google-targeted remedy is essentially a standing order: if the European Union (EU) or US forces Google to change its adtech operations, those remedies must automatically apply to South Africa too.

This is smart, because it places South Africa in the slipstream of wealthier, more powerful and more populous regions with the heft to force regulatory change. If the US or EU courts order the breakup of the Google adtech stack — the software determining what advertising is shown to the user — the commission would appear to expect the same to apply in South Africa. The European Commission seems to be pushing hard for such an outcome.

Would Google actually honour that? A short Google statement on the Competition Commission’s outcome made no mention of that particular provision.

As is always the case with South African commissions, the enforcement of these remedies will be where the rubber really meets the road. On this point, the commission is far from reassuring.

An FAQ distributed alongside the report poses the question of what steps the commission can take to enforce remedial actions. It answers: “Recommendations are not enforceable, but the Commission continues to offer support and guidance to all stakeholders as required.”

Other tech players offer less impressive pledges

Unfortunately, after the Google provisions, matters start to go downhill fast.

When it comes to Meta, the report notes that the company’s intensifying algorithmic deprecation of news content has been nothing short of devastating for publishers, throttling referral traffic by 80% since 2020 for outlets like Daily Maverick.

This has “negative implications for constitutional rights”, the report states, particularly given the reliance of vernacular and community news media on Facebook.

Yet, here again, the commission has had to do a balancing act between its awareness of South Africa’s extremely limited economic clout and its desire for reform. Forcing Meta to change its news-hostile algorithm is simply a non-starter, it emerges, despite this being suggested in the commission’s provisional report in February.

Instead, the final report states, “The preferred remedy is to provide the media with substantial direct support … and the provision of ad credits to boost their presence on the user feed.”

Ad credits, the establishment of a “media liaison office” and the provision of some digital training are what Meta is prepared to offer, and it doesn’t seem like a lot.

This pattern continues among the other tech giants. Microsoft will give contracts to five national media outlets to display stories on MSN.

YouTube, which offers so little in revenue to news publishers that “one specialist news broadcaster indicated it did not even bother using the monetisation features”, will now offer training in monetisation.

TikTok will also give “access” to monetisation programmes and eventually permit South African publishers to add article links to videos — currently impossible.

And then there is X, formerly Twitter. The report notes that it attempted to obtain agreement from all social media platforms on the proposed remedies in advance, but X did not cooperate in this regard.

The commitments the report proposes for X in its absence are far from onerous. The commission’s major aim seems to be to stop X from penalising posts containing links, which has been a longstanding frustration for publishers.

X is currently experimenting with a fix “where the link shows on the same page as the post”, the report says.

But will it see this through? In a context where X owner Elon Musk has made no secret of his hatred for mainstream media, and where he repeatedly posts the line “X is the news now”, it seems deeply unlikely that his passion project will actually be willing to undertake a reform to give news articles prominence.

Compromise is the name of the game

It should be acknowledged that the Competition Commission’s task here has been extremely complicated. Big Tech has operated with impunity for years because of its extraordinary profits and power, and regulators are frantically scrambling to play catch-up in the face of a corrupted digital ecosystem controlled by a handful of billionaires with inconceivable wealth and influence.

To add a soupçon of additional pressure, US President Donald Trump, in August, posted that he would “impose substantial additional tariffs” against countries which attempted to impose regulation or taxes on “our incredible American tech companies”, reinforcing an executive order issued in February which said effectively the same thing.

With South Africa’s trade agreement with the US still up in the air, the Competition Commission had to be aware of what was at stake if it played its hand too forcefully with its recommendations.

It is clear that the report is a compromise — or, as Linley put it, a “workable agreement”.

Perhaps it was the best deal available under these constrained circumstances. But it does seem profoundly unlikely that its modest recommendations will “rebalance the share of value with the digital platforms”, as it aims to.

Will it be enough to save South African journalism? Absolutely not; no remedy can reverse years of job cuts and collapsing traffic overnight.

But there is some small satisfaction that, for the first time in this country, the platforms that have done the most to erode the audience and profits of news media are being required to do more than just shrug and point to the algorithm. DM