• The Competition Commission is concerned about the power that platforms such as Google and Meta hold over local publishers.
• The Commission will also investigate how generative AI impacts the local news environment.
• Comments regarding the inquiry must be submitted by 20th April.

While lawmakers in the US are quick to accuse foreign social media platforms of spying and hoovering up personal user data, big tech firms in the US have been accused of doing the same thing, with little consequence.

Of course, outside of American borders lawmakers in various countries have brought the likes of Meta and Google to task and now South African bodies want to take a closer look at the dominance of these, and other platforms.

On Monday, the Competition Commission published its terms of reference for a Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI).

The Commission states that it has reason to believe that, “there exist market features in digital platforms that distribute news media content which impede, distort or restrict competition”.

Furthermore, the terms of reference outline the relationship between firms such as Meta and publishers. In this relationship, the platforms hold an unfair degree of power and control.

This together with no understanding of how algorithms work, a lack of compensation for fuelling traffic to the likes of search engines and social media – further driving up engagement for those platforms – the local news environment is at risk of collapsing.

“Loss of advertising revenue for publishers means that they cannot make the necessary investments which in turn may potentially reduce the quality and diversity of news content that is available to consumers. A smooth transition into digital distribution requires considerable investment in technology and highly skilled developers which comes at a high cost. This effectively means that competition on quality in the news publishing sector is diminished,” wrote the Commission.

We’re also rather impressed that the Commission is aware of the dangers that large language model artificial intelligence poses. Tech like ChatGPT being incorporated into the likes of Bing means that users can simply ask it to relay the most up-to-date news on a matter. This bypasses the need for a user to go to an external website and keeps the user on Bing. The trouble here is that without that website traffic, publishers have to close up shop as advertisers will more than likely opt to spend their money where the users are.

“It is unclear the extent to which these systems may pose a threat to online content publishers, especially news publishers, in the form of significant competition and public interest concerns in South Africa. However, this should be investigated in these early stages such that appropriate remedies can be implemented to reduce or eradicate future competition and public interest harm to news media businesses,” reads the terms of reference.

The scope of the inquiry includes but is not limited to:

• Search engines (Google, Bing and others),
• Social media sites (Meta platforms),
• News aggregators (Google News and Apple News),
• Video sharing platforms (YouTube and TikTok),
• Generative AI services (Both ChatGPT and its integration with Bing),
• Other platforms identified in the course of the inquiry.

The inquiry will commence 20 business days from the publication of the terms of reference. Comments can be submitted to Noluthando Jokazi via email. That email address is mdpmi[at]compcom[dot]co[dot]za.

Comments must be submitted by 20th April 2023.