President Bola Tinubu has ordered a comprehensive investigation into major global technology corporations and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms regarding allegations of anti-competitive market behavior and the unauthorized exploitation of local news content.
The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) will spearhead the probe. The regulatory body intends to scrutinize the operations of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Meta, X (formerly Twitter), and various generative AI entities active within the country.
The presidential directive follows a unified petition submitted to the Presidency by the Nigerian Press Organisation (NPO). This NPO serves as an umbrella coalition for major domestic media bodies, representing the interests of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN), the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), the Broadcasting Organisations of Nigeria (BON), and the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP).
The Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, officially transferred the executive mandate to the FCCPC to initiate the formal regulatory inquiry.
According to a statement released by Ondaje Ijagwu, the FCCPC’s Director of Corporate Affairs, the investigation aims to determine whether global tech giants are distorting fair market competition or unfairly utilizing proprietary editorial content without compensating local newsrooms.
For several years, the Nigerian media industry has voiced serious concerns over shrinking advertising revenues. Local news entities argue that foreign digital platforms extract massive revenues from Nigerian audiences by indexing, hosting, and utilizing locally produced journalism while failing to reinvest back into domestic newsrooms or offer fair financial compensation.
The FCCPC statement emphasized that big tech firms have officially come under its regulatory radar for potential market manipulation, lack of algorithmic transparency, and unfair distribution of news content. This sweeping regulatory move marks a major shift in how Nigeria intends to govern international digital platforms, mirroring global legislative trends aimed at forcing tech giants to pay local publishers for news content.