Nigeria’s president has ordered a sweeping antitrust investigation into global tech giants and artificial intelligence platforms over the alleged “unlawful exploitation” of local news content.

President Bola Tinubu directed the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) to launch the inquiry following a joint petition from the country’s major media unions, including the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria and the Nigeria Union of Journalists.

The probe will target tech giants including Meta, Alphabet (Google), X (formerly Twitter), and various generative AI firms.

Local publishers argue that global platforms are systematically stripping them of advertising revenue by scraping and using their journalistic content without fair compensation.

AI Training Under the Scanner

The FCCPC stated that the investigation will focus heavily on how tech companies and AI models use local intellectual property.

The antitrust regulator will investigate three core areas:

• Market Dominance: Assessing whether tech giants are using their size to distort competition in Nigeria’s digital advertising market.
• Data Scraping: Investigating the unauthorized extraction and “ingestion” of copyrighted Nigerian news articles and broadcasts to train generative AI models.
• Lack of Compensation: Examining the refusal of global tech companies to negotiate fair commercial deals with local newsrooms.

“Our responsibility is to objectively determine the facts and ensure that competition within the digital ecosystem remains fair, transparent, and consistent with Nigerian law,” said FCCPC Chief Executive Tunji Bello.

Mr Bello maintained that the inquiry does not presume any wrongdoing but aims to protect the sustainability of Nigeria’s media ecosystem.

Following the South African Precedent

The move mirrors a growing global backlash against Big Tech’s dominance over publishers.

It follows a similar landmark investigation by South Africa’s Competition Commission, which resulted in Google agreeing to pay local news media an estimated 688m rand ($40m) annually over a multi-year period for using their content.

This is not Nigeria’s first clash with Silicon Valley. In 2025, the FCCPC slapped Meta with a landmark $220m (£173m) fine for data privacy violations and market abuse—a ruling the Facebook-parent company has since appealed.