Did the Competition Commission let Meta off the hook?

The publication of the Competition Commission’s Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI) final report was a landmark for South Africa, the continent, and Global South regulation more broadly.

It is one of the most serious attempts by any Global South competition regulator to confront platform power, and its findings will guide strategies and remedies far beyond South Africa’s borders. What follows is my assessment of the remedies in relation to one specific company, not of the inquiry’s overall ambition or integrity (which I have lauded elsewhere).

That company is Meta.

Earlier this year, South African publishers appealed the commission’s remedial framework as it applies to Meta. That appeal to the Competition Tribunal, along with other appeals arising from the inquiry, has not been made public. The South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) recently asked the tribunal to publish all appeals. While there appears to be no objection in principle from the tribunal, it says that it is waiting for approval from other parties before it can share any further information.

There is no clear rule requiring that appeal papers following a market inquiry be published as a matter of course. Unlike many regulatory processes in South Africa, market inquiry appeal procedures do not automatically place documents on the public record. That gap needs to be closed. The Tribunal should not need to wait on the parties and (should be able to) decide that an appeal following a market inquiry should be public unless a party can demonstrate specific, legitimate grounds for confidentiality.

In the meantime, while we are waiting for these papers, I am going to try to answer the question posed in this piece. The commission’s public record is comprehensive enough to support my approach.

What Meta actually got away with

Responding to submissions that questioned “why the remedies require payments from Google but not the social media companies”, the commission said this “misunderstands the differing nature of value creation”. Search “needs to source the best information from publishers to respond to user news queries”, deriving value “through building its value proposition and being able to then profit from commercial search”.

Social media, by contrast, “places user-generated posts into a feed to derive engagement”, and “publishers actively choose to post to build audience and engagement”. The commission concluded that “the monetisation of content on social media platforms is a form of value creation and transfer that is currently not available on search engines”, and that Google’s News Showcase remedy “effectively creates an on-platform monetisation option akin to those of social media.”

But the MDPMI record shows that bargaining power between the platform and publishers is profoundly asymmetric, and that Meta’s algorithmic decisions and tech design have dramatically affected publishers’ reach and revenue.

The question is therefore not whether Meta needs news to exist, but whether its market power allows it to reshape the news distribution market in ways that harm competition.

The commission’s own cited data makes the stakes clear: the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024 found that 71% of South Africans get their news from social media – dwarfing the share who use search to find news. This share is not reflected in the remedial actions.

In terms of the negotiated remedial actions, Google is required to pay South African news publishers R71-million per year through Google News Showcase, amounting to R355-million over five years, as part of a broader package valued at R688-million (approximately $42-billion).

Meta’s financial commitment, on the other hand, is in the form of advertising credits: up to about R413 629 ($25,000) for national publishers over three years, up to about R83 000 ($5,000) for smaller publishers, capped at R24.82m ($1.5m) in total. Publishers must spend those credits within Meta’s advertising system, effectively buying back the reach that Meta’s intentional platform decisions removed from them in the first place. The remainder of Meta’s commitment consists of a liaison office, platform support workshops, and digital literacy programmes – none of which involves direct financial transfers to publishers.

That is neither a proportionate nor an effective remedy.

Publishers are entirely dependent on Meta’s goodwill

The commission’s rationale rests on a key premise that social media already provides publishers with a monetisation channel, and that the appropriate fix is to improve access to it. Annexure 4 of the commission’s final report records that Facebook’s total in-stream advertising revenue shared with South African news publishers amounted to less than 0.5% of the total available revenue. Meta paid just over R496 000 ($30,000) to 16 participating publishers across the relevant period.

Following the MDPMI, Meta’s total commitment to South African news publishers is R41m ($2.5m) over three years. That figure is not proportionate to the harm or the scale of the entity. It does not qualify as a rounding error in the Meta accounts. As of this week, Meta Platforms has a market capitalisation of approximately R28 trillion ($1.69-trillion), with 2025 revenue exceeding R3.3 trillion ($200-billion).

Platform deprioritisation of news links continues

The lack of a proportionate financial remedy is not the only place where publishers feel short-changed when it comes to Meta. The provisional report had proposed that Meta (and X) be required to stop deprioritising news links in its algorithmic feed, a structural intervention that would have addressed the mechanism by which publishers have lost reach, not merely the monetisation that follows from it.

In practical terms, the proposal would have prevented Meta from systematically reducing the visibility of professional news content in users’ feeds compared with other engagement-driven content.

However, it did not survive into the final report. Publishers lost on both fronts: no direct payment, and no constraint on Meta’s deliberate algorithmic choices that eroded publishers’ audiences.

The commission simultaneously found that Meta’s bargaining power over publishers caused market harm, and then designed a remedy that could leave publishers entirely at Meta’s mercy.

One reason the commission may have shied away from a financial remedy is methodological: how do you calculate what Meta owes when its relationship to news is indirect? It is a fair question. Recent litigation in Europe suggests a possible approach to that problem.

Alternative approach to quantifying harm

In November 2025, a Madrid Commercial Court ordered Meta to pay €479-million to 87 Spanish digital news publishers. The court found that Meta had unlawfully processed user data for behavioural advertising under an invalid GDPR legal basis, giving Meta a significant competitive advantage over publishers in the same digital advertising market. The remedy flowed from the illegality of Meta’s conduct and its distorting effect on the advertising market, not from a finding of market power alone. A similar action has been filed against Meta in France by 67 media organisations.

What matters about the Spanish ruling is not the legal theory behind it, but the method the court used to calculate the harm. The court did not attempt to calculate the value of news content article by article. Instead, it calculated the competitive distortion in the digital advertising market created by Meta’s conduct, and awarded damages to publishers as competitors in that market. Valuing the distortion rather than the content offers an approach that could be adapted across different legal frameworks.

The complexity of calculating a financial remedy for Meta (when compared with Google’s financial remedies) is a reason for the commission to choose its methodologies carefully. It is not a reason to walk away from a financial remedy altogether.

Meta is appealing the Spanish ruling. In my view, the approach stands regardless of how those cases resolve.

Publishers have other options

It is not the end of the road for publishers if the Competition Tribunal declines to amend the remedial framework and remedies dealing with Meta.

Taking the Spanish ruling into account, the publishers could lodge a formal complaint against Meta under the Competition Act, alleging abuse of dominance and other contraventions of the Act in respect of Meta’s treatment of news publishers. The commission has already established Meta’s market power, bargaining asymmetry and harm to publishers’ ability to compete for digital advertising. These findings could serve as a valuable foundation for any future action by news publishers.

Meta is one of the most powerful companies in the world, and any legal or regulatory process against it will be long and expensive. But a substantial financial settlement would provide just compensation for demonstrably harmful conduct. That is worth fighting for. DM

Note: This article does not constitute legal advice. Publishers should consult their legal and regulatory economic advisers before lodging a complaint against Meta under the Competition Act. I plan to update my analysis once the appeal papers become public.

Disclosure: Michael Markovitz is the director of the Media Leadership Think Tank (MLTT) at the Gordon Institute of Business Science. The MLTT contributed to the MDPMI through submissions coordinated by the Sanef-led civil society alliance. He also made an independent oral submission to the Commission.

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