Framing the Fight for Fairer Digital Markets

South Africa is at a critical juncture in the global fight for fairer digital media markets, and a new publication — Framing the Fight for Fairer Digital Markets by Michael Markovitz — provides an essential guide to understanding this moment. This interim analysis explores how a journalism-led civil society alliance, coordinated by the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF), influenced the country’s Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI) led by the Competition Commission.

This document is more than a policy digest for journalists — it is a roadmap to understanding how their future is being shaped behind regulatory and algorithmic curtains. Here’s why every journalist in South Africa should download and study it.

What’s in the Document?

The report offers a detailed account of how a coalition of journalists, media organisations, academics, and public interest groups helped frame the MDPMI’s scope, submissions, and early recommendations. It traces SANEF’s leadership role in coordinating input from community media, public broadcasters, digital rights advocates and academia, creating one of the most significant acts of collaborative journalism advocacy in the democratic era.

Among the coalition’s key contributions were:

• Framing the Inquiry Around Constitutional Rights: The alliance positioned journalism as a public good, calling for protections rooted in South Africa’s Constitution, particularly freedom of expression, access to information, and media diversity.
• Challenging Algorithmic Bias: The alliance spotlighted how opaque algorithms on platforms like Google and Meta deprioritise local and vernacular news, hurting independent publishers and skewing public access to credible information.
• Calling Out AdTech Exploitation: It exposed how programmatic advertising diverts value from quality journalism to viral and often harmful content, demanding structural reform of digital advertising practices.
• Defining Credible Journalism Through Accountability: The alliance pushed for regulatory definitions that favour news organisations affiliated with self-regulatory bodies like the Press Council and BCCSA, reinforcing journalistic ethics and trust.
• Advocating for a Media Industry Fund: Instead of short-term bailouts, the alliance called for a sustainable, independent fund — financed by a levy on digital ad revenue — to support diverse, public interest journalism across the country.
• Highlighting the Public Broadcaster’s Role: The SABC’s exclusion from initial compensation discussions was challenged, ensuring the public broadcaster’s inclusion in eventual remedies.
• Addressing Generative AI Exploitation: The alliance raised early concerns about how AI models are trained on news content without permission or compensation, advocating for transparency and negotiation frameworks.

This is not just abstract policy work. The MDPMI has made provisional recommendations that could directly affect newsroom sustainability, algorithmic visibility, and funding models. These include:

• Considering ordering Google and other platforms to pay R300–R500 million annually to support South African journalism.
• Introducing a 5–10% levy on digital advertising to fund an independent media support structure if platforms refuse fair compensation.
• Structural remedies to restore visibility to local and credible journalism in search and social media feeds.

The report also reveals Google’s resistance to these reforms, showing why coordinated advocacy and legal clarity are critical if journalism is to thrive in the digital age.

Why You Should Read It

If you work in journalism today, you’re already affected by the shifting power of platforms. Your stories may not reach audiences not because of their quality, but because an algorithm deprioritised them. You may see advertising revenue fall despite strong readership, or struggle to monetise content in a system stacked against smaller outlets.

This document offers tools to understand — and challenge — that system.

It equips journalists with:

• A legal and constitutional framework to defend journalism as a public good.
• Knowledge of current digital platform practices and their consequences.
• Strategic insight into how collective advocacy is shaping the national agenda.

Conclusion

Framing the Fight for Fairer Digital Markets is a must-read for all journalists, editors, media owners, and journalism educators. It’s not just a snapshot of the past two years of digital policy work; it is a blueprint for how journalists can assert their role in shaping a fairer digital media landscape.

Download it. Read it. Share it. Your newsroom’s survival may depend on what comes next.

• Michael Markovitz is the Director of Media Leadership Think-Tank at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria