A staffing decision with policy consequences
Effective 1 September 2026, Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Parks Tau appointed Busikhosibakhe David Majenge and Tamara Leigh Mokoka as Deputy Commissioners of the Competition Commission, according to the government's announcement. Majenge has been at the Commission since 2008 and most recently ran its Legal Services division. Mokoka previously led its Mergers and Acquisitions division. The department said the appointments would strengthen executive leadership and the continuity of enforcement work.
The announcement says nothing about digital platforms. The timing still matters. The Commission is moving from a long inquiry into implementation, and implementation is where competition remedies usually succeed or fail.
What the inquiry produced
On 13 November 2025 the Commission launched the final report of its Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry. Its centrepiece is a R688 million media support package from Google and YouTube. According to Engineering News, the package funds content licensing arrangements, innovation grants and capacity building, with support aimed at national, community and non-English-language media.
The same report says other platforms made commitments. Per that coverage, Meta offered ad credits, resources and training for local media. TikTok offered new publisher support programmes. X Corp is required to make all of its monetisation programmes available in South Africa. Commission chair James Hodge said most companies had agreed to the remedies. Acts Online's summary adds that the remedy set covers AdTech transparency standards and guidelines on how AI models use content.
The strongest case for the Commission's approach
The argument for aggressive intervention is serious. The Commission found that a handful of firms control the gateways through which South Africans reach news: search, social media and AI tools. If a dominant search engine displays or summarises publishers' work and pays nothing, the publishers' decline is partly a market failure and not only a consequence of changing reader habits. A negotiated package also delivers money in months, where a contested abuse-of-dominance case could take years in the Tribunal and the courts. On that view, extracting concrete commitments quickly was pragmatic.
We accept most of that. Settlement beats litigation for a small market with limited regulatory capacity.
Where proportionality starts to matter
The risks sit in the next phase. Negotiated remedies are only as good as their definitions, their reporting and the Commission's ability to check them. Three questions will determine whether this model serves publishers and readers or just generates a headline number.
- Who gets the money, and on what terms? Content licensing deals can quietly favour large incumbents with the leverage to negotiate. If innovation grants and licensing flows go mostly to established publishers, the "community and vernacular media" objective is not met. Published allocation data would settle this.
- Is the benefit measured? A rand figure counts as an input. Competition policy should be judged on outputs: referral traffic, advertising rates, newsroom jobs, and whether small outlets are reaching audiences. The Commission should commit to reporting such metrics, and platforms should share the data needed to compute them.
- Do the AI and AdTech rules stay proportionate? Aligning with international approaches on AI content use is sensible in principle. But rules that require licensing for every use of publicly available content could raise costs for local AI start-ups that cannot afford what Google or OpenAI can. Transparency obligations are cheaper and less distortionary than payment mandates, and they are a better first tool.
There is also a free-expression angle. Funding mechanisms that route money through a single regulator-approved channel create a risk that editorial independence is tested by financial dependence. Arm's-length administration, such as the Digital News Transformation Fund model referenced in coverage of the report, matters more than the headline amount.
What the new Deputy Commissioners should prioritise
Capacity is a real constraint. Market inquiries are resource-heavy, and monitoring several platform agreements at once, alongside merger review and cartel work, strains any agency. Majenge's legal background and Mokoka's merger-review experience are useful for drafting enforceable undertakings and for spotting how platform acquisitions and partnerships can quietly extend market power.
Three practical steps would turn leadership capacity into credibility:
- Publish a compliance dashboard. Each platform's commitments, deadlines and status should be public, so that publishers, researchers and the platforms themselves can see what has been delivered.
- Set review points with sunset logic. Remedies that persist without evidence they work become compliance burdens that new entrants also inherit. Scheduled reviews should test whether the problem still exists.
- Keep enforcement tools in reserve. The credibility of a negotiated outcome rests on the possibility of formal action if commitments slip. The Commission should say clearly what triggers it.
The takeaway
South Africa chose negotiation over litigation, and the early evidence says that was reasonable. But a settlement is a starting point. The Commission's new deputies inherit a package whose success will be measured in the finances of small newsrooms, not in the size of the headline figure. If the Commission publishes its results, protects editorial independence and keeps AI rules proportionate, South Africa could offer a template for other mid-sized markets. If it cannot show outcomes, the model will be a cautionary example of money moved without markets improved.