Competition Commission inquiry into how digital content consumption is impacted by online platforms

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Competition Commission inquiry into how digital content consumption is impacted by online platforms

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Chris Charter: The rise of sort of massive digital platforms and their role in various economies. The commission has just about completed its first market inquiry into digital intermediary platforms. In other words, platforms that put buyers and sellers of products and services together, think Takealot, think Amazon, those kinds of platforms. That market inquiry is just wrapping up. What they didn't check out in that market inquiry was sort of search social media platforms and news aggregation sites like Like Apple news and Google news and the likes. And to see what impact that has, in this case, on a much narrower part of the economy.

SABC Newsbreak: Why is it that regulators throughout the world and even here in SA with the competition commission remain preoccupied, so preoccupied with the digital markets?

Chris Charter: Yeah, that's a good question. I think a lot of it is driven by a little bit of fear of the unknown. Some of these markets are, in a lot of jurisdiction including ours, relatively new. And when we talk about things like generative AI, like ChatGPT, a lot of regulators haven't really got the measure of it yet and they're not quite sure how it might impact the economy. But what's become clear, particularly after the covid pandemic, is that digital platforms and people's online lives has massively increased over the last half decade or so. And it's just the sheer pace with which those developments happened. And I think, old or young, I think everybody is now very much has an online presence .

SABC Newsbreak: What are some of the issues that will be considered in this inquiry? We're hearing fair payments for content is one of them.

Chris Charter: Yeah, exactly. So I think if you if you look at it from this perspective; nowadays news publishers are making a lot less money out of actually publishing newspapers, for instance. And although part of their business model is to try and get people to subscribe to their own website, etc., that's proven quite difficult to do, partly because so much of the news is available for free on Google, for instance.

So the real way in which people can make money on the digital space is by selling advertising.

And I think any media house knows pretty much how that works. And the difficulty is that Google and Facebook and all of those sites also monetize consumer attention onto their website to sell advertising space. And what this really is, is a battle for the ability to get advertising revenue. What a company like Google is alleged to be doing, they sort of troll the internet and they find new snippets, which they publish on their website. Now in a perfect world, what should happen is, the consumer should click on a Google search, and so well here's an interesting article in Business Day or the Mail & Guardian or whatever it might be, and then that traffic should get driven to the Mail & Guardian, where Mail & Guardian can earn advertising revenue, because the advertisers know that people are on the Mail & Guardian website reading articles.

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