Parliament has welcomed measures against Big Tech to correct the imbalance imposed on SA’s media industry, recommended by competition authorities on Monday after an 18-month investigation.
The government said the measures would bode well for SA’s public broadcaster, the SABC.
Khusela Diko, chair of parliament’s portfolio committee on communication and digital technologies, said she welcomed the recommendations of the Competition Commission’s provisional report on the Media and Digital Platform Market Inquiry (MDPMI).
The commission released a provisional report on Monday recommending that Google compensate the media industry to the value of R300m to R500m annually for a three- to five-year period, which could boost SA’s ailing traditional media houses, whose revenues have dried up over the past decade due to the rise of technology platforms and shifting consumer behaviour.
The inquiry, initiated in October 2023, was designed to examine the effects of digital platforms such as X, Facebook and Google on the distribution and monetisation of media content and whether they used anticompetitive or harmful practices that needed to be addressed.
Other remedies to address the imbalance are the removal of search bias in favour of foreign media and YouTube and the promotion of vernacular and community media.
For Diko, the competition matter helps to further projects that her committee is pushing for, such as calls for an urgent publication of the White Paper on Audio and Audiovisual Media Services and Online Content Safety by the department of communication and digital technologies.
Diko said she hoped the recommendations on Google and YouTube, among others, would serve as a deterrent to everyone that the lack of direct regulation in the sector was not a licence for unscrupulous business practices.
The MP is especially bullish about benefits for the SABC.
“For a very long time, over-the-top (OTT) digital platforms exploited the regulatory gap in the sector to the detriment of the public broadcaster, the SABC, which operates under stringent regulations. We further welcome the recommendation that media houses be remunerated for the content they produce that gets to be exploited by OTT and digital platforms,” she said.
For the likes of the SABC, the fight against OTT players also includes those that encroach on its territory in video entertainment, such Netflix and other online video entertainment platforms. The biggest, and most relevant of these, is YouTube, a major source of video entertainment in SA.
Additionally, social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram have continued to take more attention away from traditional television screens. According to a 2024 report by Ornico in collaboration with World Wide Worx, the biggest social media platform in SA is Meta-owned Facebook.
The release of the commission’s MDPMI’s recommendations took place on the same day that Diko’s committee spent a full day at the SABC as part of its weeklong oversight visit to Gauteng. That engagement is said to have reiterated the need for urgent regulation of the OTT and digital platform space.
The commission has also recommended that YouTube, owned by Google, improve the ability of the media and broadcasters, including the SABC, “to monetise their content on its platform through increases in the revenue share to 70% and active promotion of higher-value direct sales by the media”, the commission said.
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