South Africa’s Competition Commission has found Google guilty of anti-competitive practices and recommended that the tech giant pay up to 500 million rand ($27.29 million) annually to local media outlets. Meta and X also face penalties for suppressing South African news content.
In a provisional report released Monday, the regulator accused Google of skewing search results in favor of global news outlets while downplaying local and community media. This, it said, has eroded the South African media landscape over the past 14 years and will continue unless addressed.
To counter this imbalance, the watchdog proposed a three- to five-year compensation plan for news publishers, alongside changes to Google’s search algorithms to boost referral traffic to South African outlets.
A final decision is expected later this year, with all parties given until April 7 to submit responses.
Google has pushed back against the findings, stating that its platforms generated 350 million rand in referral traffic value for local publishers in 2023 while earning less than 19 million rand from ads related to news searches.
“We have invested in products, training, and partnerships to support publishers and will continue to do so,” Google said in a statement.
The Commission also recommended that Meta’s Facebook and X stop deprioritizing South African news links in their algorithms and that Meta and YouTube increase revenue-sharing options for news publishers.
Should the companies fail to comply within six months of the final report, they could face a 5-10% levy on digital advertising revenues in South Africa.
Meta has yet to respond to the findings. The proposed measures would apply only to the companies’ South African operations, the Commission confirmed.