With a few exceptions, things don't happen because of South Africa, out there on the world stage where the future is determined.
Most of the time, things happen to South Africa.
But the exceptions can be notable and historic and with long-lasting impact: the concept of ubuntu; leading on collective African policy; forcing the debate on Gaza.
We seem to be on the brink of one of those outsized exceptions again, this time about the way information is presented on the web, and perhaps how it is gathered across the internet.
Don't take it from me. There I was, last week, innocently minding my business (in this case, the business of having a viable media ecosystem) alongside a bunch of UK academics and think-tankers, when up popped a slide: “South Africa’s Competition Commissioner is leading the way in responding to Google… We’re asking other regulators… to follow suit.”
Those would be regulators in the likes of France, Italy, and the UK, as well as the European Commission, major components of what is, collectively, a regulatory superpower that often has its policies copied around the world – including in South Africa.
The “we” that is pushing the South African approach on Europe, is Foxglove, a UK non-profit that has tried to make tech fair, often by way of campaigning and strategic litigation, since 2017.
The conversation around the presentation took place under Chatham House Rules, but the presenter, Foxglove's head of strategy Tim Squirrell, kindly waived that non-attribution rule for this slide.
I asked him to do so because the messenger is important here. Foxglove does not carry a torch for South Africa. It is not trying to suck up to anyone in South Africa. For all its good-works focus, it is pretty mercenary in how it gets good things done. And it thinks that a great way to fight for fairness in Google's AI Overviews is by rallying others under the flag that South Africa has planted.
If you've missed it, AI Overviews is Google's transition from search engine to answer engine, which digests search results to offer brief summaries at the top of search pages.
The impact on click-throughs to free-to-air digital publishers is trending towards the apocalyptic.
And, if you've missed the last two decades or so, Google is effectively the internet for a great many people, and it is a trendsetter for its few competitors too. It lacks the AI mindshare of OpenAI, but its approach to answering questions has both immediate and long-term implications that speak to how, perhaps for a long time to come, knowledge will be created and distributed.
With a bit of prompting from activists in the South African media sector, the Competition Commission just happened to launch its Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry in October 2023, right about when it became obvious that this AI thing may have legs.
This February, the commission published a report with some eye-popping recommendations. For instance, it recommended that AI companies be fined up to 10% of their revenue for failing to send enough traffic to news sites they use as sources, and that there should be a 1% “digital tariff or copyright levy on content used by the AI LLM to provide an AI summary”.
The CompCom also floated R500 million as the amount it thinks Google owes news sites.
So far, so idealistic. The big providers dusted off their strategic lobbying and litigation weapon stockpiles, and we in the media sat back to wait for a lot of nothing to happen, as the South African minnow is predictably ignored by companies over which it has something approaching zero leverage.
Except, perhaps not.
Regulators love a precedent. Lobbyists love tangible examples. Developed-world politicians don't want to be embarrassed when some backwater country takes a hard line on big corporates they coddle – and end up looking bought. Voters are hard to convince that something is impossible if somebody elsewhere in the world is doing it.
So, six months later, people whose job it is to influence thinking and policy are hearing about South Africa's plan for how the internet should work.
We'll have to see where that goes.
But there is a lesson in there, regardless of the outcome: sometimes, when you tilt at windmills, others will join in.
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