Big tech’s free ride on Nigerian journalism is about to face official scrutiny. President Bola Tinubu has ordered the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to open an investigation into Meta, Alphabet, X and generative AI platforms operating in Nigeria, responding to a joint complaint from the country’s media industry over alleged anti competitive conduct and the unlicensed use of local news content.
The complaint came from the Nigerian Press Organisation, an umbrella group representing the Nigerian Guild of Editors, the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria, the Nigeria Union of Journalists, the Broadcasting Organisations of Nigeria and the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers, which argued that certain technology companies have undermined fair competition, damaged the commercial viability of Nigerian media outlets and infringed on publisher and creator rights. Minister of Information and National Orientation Mohammed Idris relayed the president’s directive to the commission by letter, naming the companies under review.
FCCPC Executive Vice Chairman Tunji Bello framed the coming investigation as a fact finding exercise rather than a verdict already reached, promising an independent, transparent, evidence based process in which every party gets a fair chance to present its side before the commission draws any conclusions about anti competitive outcomes or unfair practices. He said the commission’s job is to balance the media’s strategic role in Nigerian democracy against technology’s role in driving innovation, ensuring competition in the digital space stays fair and lawful.
Two questions sit at the centre of the inquiry: whether the named companies violated the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act of 2018 through market dominance or anti competitive behaviour, and whether they unlawfully scraped, ingested or otherwise used copyrighted Nigerian news content, including broadcast material, to train generative AI models without paying for it or negotiating terms with publishers. Investigators will also look into whether Nigerian media houses have ever been given a genuine opportunity to negotiate fair compensation for the use of their journalism.
This is not the FCCPC’s first tangle with a global tech giant. The commission previously investigated Meta and fined it $220 million in 2025 for violations including data privacy breaches, a ruling now under appeal. Nigeria is also watching a precedent set in South Africa, where regulators secured an agreement from Google to pay South African news media roughly $40 million a year, in rand terms 688 million, for three to five years.
