Copy, Paste, Compensate: Nigeria’s Misguided Bid to Make Big Tech Pay for News
Nigeria has looked south and seen a $40 million payday for the press. The trouble is that it misread both the price tag and the fine print—and its attempt to collect may leave Nigerian publishers with fewer readers and no comparable payday.
On July 6, Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) announced investigations into Meta, Alphabet, X, and unnamed generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies. The announcement followed a petition to the Nigerian presidency from the Nigerian Press Organization (NPO).
The FCCPC identified three concerns: market dominance, the use of copyrighted news content to train AI models, and the absence of “equitable commercial engagement.”
The press release’s final paragraph makes the FCCPC’s model explicit. It claims that a similar inquiry in South Africa ended with Google agreeing to pay South African news organizations 688 million rand ($40 million) annually for three to five years. As I explained in a previous piece, regulatory ambition has its own politics: An agency’s next move often follows the path laid by its counterparts abroad.
But the FCCPC has misread the South African precedent in two important respects. First, 688 million rand is the total Google committed over five years, not an annual payment. Second, Google negotiated that payment under a statutory market-inquiry regime, a formal process that may give the South African Competition Commission (SACC) real power to impose remedies. Nigeria has no comparable regime.
Nigeria is importing South Africa’s answer without South Africa’s legal machinery.