A South African media think-tank has raised concerns about Facebook’s decision to stop publishing news content in some markets at a time when regulatory bodies in many countries are probing Big Tech’s allegedly disproportionate gains from such content, which they distribute but do not invest in producing.

Michael Markovitz, a media industry veteran and former SABC board director who founded and leads the Gordon Institute of Business Science’s Media Leadership Think Tank, raised this concern at the Competition Commission’s inquiry into competition in media and digital platforms in Pretoria on Tuesday.

“It surely cannot be correct that a company with three to four billion users, after decades of unfairly benefiting from quality news content, just coincidently – as the regulatory heat starts rising across the globe – announces a unilateral opt-out of news content…,” Markovitz said in a presentation.

His comments follow Meta Platforms’ announcement last week that it would discontinue a tab on Facebook that promoted news in Australia and the US, following a similar decision in the UK, Germany and France last year. The move is seen as Meta’s counter to new regulations in these jurisdictions that force Big Tech companies to pay news outlets for using their content.

“The idea that one company can profit from others’ investment, not just investment in capital but investment in people [and] investment in journalism, is unfair,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters last week in response to Meta’s decision. “That’s not the Australian way.”

According to Markovitz, South African lawmakers are going to face a similar problem regarding the enforceability of any remedial actions that might flow from the Competition Commission’s inquiry.

Antitrust

He urged the commission to approach the inquiry in a way that will not only solve problems in South Africa’s context but set a precedent for other jurisdictions in the so-called “Global South” (developing and underdeveloped countries), which he said might have to resort to collective bargaining strategies to take on Big Tech.

When Meta made a similar move to pull news off Facebook in Canada, publishers there launched an antitrust complaint against the company. Markovitz advised the Competition Commission to follow up on that particular case, saying the response by publishers was correct because “Meta’s actions block the ability of news outlets to operate and trade on a platform that is [owned] by a hugely dominant player”.

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“Further research needs to be done on assessing the lawfulness of platform responses like blocking news content,” he said. “Surely this deprecating, de-amplification and blocking of news is actually not legitimate conduct from a platform that is inarguably dominant in its respective markets and one of the largest companies in human history.”