South Africa's Competition Commission has closed the most consequential antitrust action against Big Tech yet attempted on the continent — and, for once, the outcome leans toward negotiation rather than coercion. On 13 November 2025 the Commission released the final report of its Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI), capping a probe launched in October 2023. The centrepiece is a R688 million (roughly US$40 million) Media Support Package agreed with Google and YouTube, payable over five years, alongside enforceable behavioural commitments from Meta, TikTok, X, Microsoft and AI firms including OpenAI.
As we approach mid-2026, the package is moving into implementation — and the contrast with how this probe began is striking. It is worth examining why the climbdown from the Commission's opening threats is the right call, and where the framework still overreaches.
Steelmanning the Commission
First, the case for intervention is real. South Africa's news sector has been hollowed out: newsroom closures, collapsing print revenue, and a digital advertising market in which two firms capture the lion's share of spend. The Commission found that Google dominates the search gateway through which most South Africans reach news, that its ranking systematically overrepresented large foreign outlets while underrepresenting vernacular and community media, and that platforms profit from news content they neither license nor compensate. That is a genuine bargaining-power asymmetry, and a diverse, multilingual press is a real democratic good. A regulator that documented this and walked away would have failed its mandate.
So the question is not whether to act, but how. And here the final report is markedly more proportionate than the provisional one.
From a punitive levy to a negotiated package
The Commission's February 2025 provisional report was aggressive. It recommended Google pay between R300 million and R500 million per year for three to five years, and — crucially — warned that if platforms refused to cooperate it would pursue a 5–10% digital levy on the tech giants to fund local media, as TechCentral reported at the time. A blanket revenue levy is a blunt instrument: it taxes a proxy (turnover) rather than the harm, invites retaliation, and hands government a permanent claim on foreign firms' revenue with little link to actual news value.
The final package abandoned that path. Instead of an imposed annual tribute, the Commission secured a negotiated, enforceable set of commitments. Google's R688 million flows through specific, auditable channels: contributions to a Digital News Transformation Fund (R38 million annually for three years, plus R19 million in matching funds for two more), content licensing, R11.6 million in training on web performance, analytics and AI tools, and vernacular-language support routed through the Media Development and Diversity Agency. Meta agreed to a local Media Liaison Office and expanded monetisation access; YouTube opened automatic Partner Programme access to all South African media; TikTok and X extended monetisation tools; Microsoft added national publishers to MSN; and AI companies committed to offer the same content opt-out controls available in the EU.
This is the better model. Behavioural, negotiated remedies tied to defined harms are more defensible than a turnover tax, and they preserve the platforms' incentive to keep operating in — and investing in — the market.
The Canada warning the Commission appears to have heeded
The alternative was on full display next door in the policy world. Canada's 2023 Online News Act (Bill C-18) tried to force platforms into mandatory payments for news links; Meta responded by simply blocking news content for Canadian users, cutting referral traffic to the very publishers the law meant to help. A coercive South African levy risked the same own-goal — and the Commission's pivot to a co-designed package, which most platforms accepted and began implementing immediately, suggests it learned the lesson. Notably, the remedy asks Meta to restore news referral traffic rather than threatening penalties that might prompt it to withdraw news entirely.
Where it still overreaches
Proportionate does not mean perfect. Three cautions stand out.
- Managed money is not structural reform. As the Daily Maverick noted, a five-year package offers "scant hope" of fixing an industry whose decline is driven by audience and business-model shifts no platform transfer can reverse. R688 million spread across five years and dozens of outlets is a cushion, not a cure — and risks making newsrooms dependent on the very platforms they cover.
- The AI and content-curation mandates edge toward speech governance. Dictating how ranking algorithms surface news, and pairing the report with a recommended independent social media ombud, moves a competition regulator into territory that touches editorial and content decisions — a line that should be drawn carefully.
- The levy threat has not vanished, only paused. Because the package rests partly on the implicit alternative of a 5–10% levy, the precedent of revenue-taxing foreign platforms remains alive for the next inquiry, here and across Africa.
The bigger picture
There is irony in the timing. As Pretoria finalises a framework aimed squarely at foreign platforms, South Africa's own homegrown internet giant is thriving: Prosus, the Amsterdam-listed arm of Naspers, reported on 19 June 2026 that all its operating ecosystems had reached profitability on US$7.3 billion in revenue — "no longer just a Tencent story," as TechCabal put it. South Africa can both build global tech champions and regulate dominant gatekeepers. The MDPMI shows it can do the latter without reaching first for the bluntest tool — and that restraint, more than the rand figure, is the outcome worth defending.