Independent Media has launched an appeal against the final report of the Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry, arguing that the Competition Commission unlawfully excluded it from access to remedial benefits because it is not a member of the Press Council of South Africa. Just weeks after theCompetition Commission finalisedSouth Africa’s first attempt to claw back value from Big Tech, an appeal has already been launched against its findings. The Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI) report was three years in the making, a sprawling attempt to rebalance the economics of digital news after a decade in which Google and Meta siphoned audiences and advertising from collapsing local newsrooms.
Its remedies, as the commission stressed, were carefully calibrated for a small market operating under the glare of geopolitical pressure: hardly the kind of context in which shaking up the Big Tech monoliths is easy Yet even those modest suggested reforms have now provoked a challenge — not over whether Big Tech should be paying up, but over who is allowed to receive a slice of the pie. At issue is one of the report’s few concrete financial wins for local journalism: Google’s commitment to contribute R688-million to South African news publishers over five years. The commission recommended that only outlets adhering to recognised ethical oversight — specifically, members of either the Press Council of South Africa or the Broadcasting Complaints Commission — should automatically qualify for these benefits.
Independent Media is not among them. And, as a result, it wants the rules changed. At the heart of the dispute is a debate that has simmered in South African news media for years: what counts as legitimate regulation?
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“South Africa news media is self-regulated,” stated Independent Media’s non-executive director, Lucien Jacobs, in his affidavit to the commission. “This self-regulation is achieved in various ways. Some media houses voluntarily join the Press Council, while others use [an] internal self-regulation system.” Independent falls into the latter category, having created its own in-house complaints mechanism: the Independent Media Ombudsman, also referred to as the Office of the Public Editor or Group Ombud.
This approach, Jacobs claims, follows the “Guardian UK model of internal self-regulation”. Independent Media repeatedly compares itself to The Guardian throughout Jacobs’ affidavit, arguing that if The Guardian was entitled to Google money in Australia after a similar process, so too is Independent.
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