Cape Town - The Competition Commission has set its sights on technology giants such as Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) after its findings that they had distorted competition with paid search results.
To tackle the issue, the commission has launched a Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI) to focus on search engines, social media sites, video-sharing platforms, and news aggregation platforms.
The MDPMI comes after a year-long provisional investigation of online markets, and follows several similar investigations led by competition authorities, globally, on the impact of digital platforms on news media publishers that use these platforms to distribute their content online.
Spokesperson Siyabulela Makunga said the commission felt there might exist market features on digital platforms which distributed news media content that impeded, distorted or restricted competition, and which might have adverse implications for the South African news media sector.
He said many countries had adopted measures to alleviate the competition and consumer concerns stemming from the impact of digital platforms on the news media.
Makunga said search engines, social media sites, video-sharing platforms, and news aggregation platforms used their dominance to extract copyright news snippet content for free.
In November last year, a former senior Google employee, Marissa Mayer, said that snippets, or zero-click search results, showed the information users needed on the search results page, allowing them to receive their answer without having to click through to a website.
Makunga said South Africa was seeing a similar trend in which the distribution of news content over digital platforms such as search engines, social media, video-sharing platforms and news aggregation sites/apps, had created greater reliance on these platforms over time.
When the commission’s findings report was made public in July last year, one of the recommendations was that paid results be prominently labelled as advertising.
Google said it would review the report and work constructively with the commission to answer their questions.
The commission has published a draft terms of reference for the MDPMI and interested stakeholders have until April 20 to submit written comments on it.
mwangi.githahu@inl.co.za