“Nigeria Must Follow Australia’s Lead and Make Big Tech Pay for Our Journalism” — Prof. Ademola

Published By Jerry Adesewo Last updated Aug 22, 2026

“Nigeria Must Follow Australia’s Lead and Make Big Tech Pay for Our Journalism” — Prof. Ademola

By Jerry Adesewo, Abuja

Australia’s decision to make major technology companies pay more for the news content that drives engagement on their platforms has opened a new debate about the future of journalism in the digital age—and Nigeria may have more at stake in that debate than most countries.

The Australian government has enacted the News Bargaining Incentive, a framework designed to compel large digital platforms to negotiate commercial agreements with local news organisations. Under the law, platforms that meet specified revenue and user thresholds and fail to reach the required number of agreements can face a levy of up to 2.5 per cent of their Australian digital advertising revenue. The money raised is intended to support Australian journalism.

The significance of the Australian action goes beyond the size of the levy. It represents an attempt by a national government to confront the imbalance between global technology companies and the news organisations whose journalism supplies much of the information circulating on their platforms.

For Professor Ojo Emmanuel Ademola, Africa’s first Professor of Cybersecurity and Information Technology Management, Nigeria should pay close attention to what Australia is doing and consider developing its own mechanism for ensuring that global digital platforms contribute to the sustainability of Nigerian journalism.

A changing digital bargain

For years, the relationship between traditional media and technology platforms has been presented as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Newspapers and broadcasters produce the journalism; platforms provide the distribution. Publishers gain audiences while Google, Meta and others benefit from increased user engagement. The economics, however, have become increasingly uneven.

Advertising that once sustained newspapers and broadcast organisations has migrated overwhelmingly towards digital platforms. At the same time, news organisations continue to invest heavily in journalists, reporters, photographers, editors, and investigative teams whose work produces the original material that audiences consume online.

Australia’s latest intervention is an attempt to address that imbalance. The legislation builds on the country’s earlier News Media Bargaining Code, introduced in 2021, but seeks to close a loophole exposed when Meta stopped renewing agreements with Australian publishers and removed or reduced the prominence of news on its platforms. The new mechanism is designed to make refusal to negotiate more expensive for major platforms.

The Australian government expects the framework to strengthen the financial sustainability of the country’s news industry. Media organisations have welcomed the measure, arguing that journalism cannot remain sustainable if the platforms benefiting from news content contribute nothing towards its production.

But the policy is not without controversy. Meta has described the proposal as unfair, while Google has questioned why some other digital companies are excluded. The debate demonstrates just how difficult it has become for governments to regulate businesses whose economic power crosses national borders.

For Nigeria, that is precisely why the Australian experiment deserves attention.

Nigeria’s media industry cannot afford to wait

Nigeria’s journalism industry is confronting its own existential crisis. Newspaper circulation has declined, advertising revenues have weakened, and the cost of gathering news has increased dramatically. Newsrooms have been forced to operate with fewer journalists, fewer regional correspondents, and increasingly limited resources for investigative reporting.

Yet Nigerian journalism has arguably never been more important.

The country is dealing with political polarisation, insecurity, misinformation, disinformation, and growing public distrust of institutions. Elections increasingly unfold across social media. Government policies are debated online. Public officials are held to account through journalism that is subsequently distributed, discussed, and amplified on digital platforms.

The paradox is obvious: Nigerian journalism remains essential to the country’s democracy, but the economic model supporting that journalism is under severe pressure.

Professor Ademola’s argument is that Nigeria must begin looking at news content not simply as material that platforms distribute but as an economic and intellectual asset produced by Nigerian institutions and professionals.

The question is therefore not whether Nigerians should be allowed to access news on Facebook, Google, TikTok, or other platforms. They should. The question is whether the companies benefiting economically from that ecosystem should contribute to the cost of producing the journalism on which their engagement increasingly depends.

The AI question makes the debate even bigger

The argument becomes more complicated with the arrival of generative artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence systems increasingly rely on enormous quantities of publicly available information to train models and generate responses. News articles, photographs, interviews, cultural materials, and other forms of intellectual property are part of the wider information ecosystem from which AI systems derive value.

That creates a new question for Nigeria: who owns the value created from Nigerian information?

The concern expressed by Professor Ademola is that Nigeria could repeat with artificial intelligence the same pattern that has historically characterised the extraction of African resources: valuable material is produced locally, exported, or appropriated by powerful external interests; transformed into high-value products elsewhere; and the original producers receive little of the economic benefit.

For the media industry, this could become particularly significant. A journalist may spend hours investigating a story, interviewing sources and verifying facts. An AI system may subsequently summarise that journalism in seconds, potentially reducing the incentive for readers to visit the original publisher.

The Australian debate is already moving in this direction. Major Australian media organisations have called for AI companies to enter licensing arrangements for journalism and cultural content, while industry figures have argued that original reporting must be protected and compensated.

Nigeria therefore has an opportunity to address the problem before it becomes even more entrenched.

What could a Nigerian model look like?

Nigeria does not necessarily have to copy Australia word for word. Its media market, regulatory environment, and digital economy are different.

But the principle could be adapted.

A Nigerian Digital News Bargaining and Compensation Framework could require large digital platforms operating in Nigeria to negotiate commercial agreements with qualifying Nigerian news organisations. Where platforms decline to negotiate, a levy or other financial obligation could apply.

Such a framework would need to be carefully designed to avoid government interference in editorial decisions. The objective should not be to determine what journalists publish or which newspapers receive public favour. It should be to establish a transparent commercial relationship between platforms and content producers.

An independent mechanism would also be necessary to determine eligibility, oversee negotiations, and resolve disputes. Smaller publishers should receive particular protection because a bargaining system dominated by Nigeria’s largest media houses could simply reproduce the inequality that already exists in the industry.

Australia’s own model has recognised this challenge by providing stronger incentives for agreements with small and medium-sized publishers and by directing part of the expected proceeds towards support for smaller outlets and new entrants.

Nigeria could go further by incorporating regional and community journalism into such a framework.

Beyond Newspapers

The debate should also not be reduced to newspapers. Nigeria’s digital information ecosystem includes television stations, radio organisations, online publishers, freelance journalists, photographers, documentary producers, and other creators. A future Nigerian framework would need to determine how value is distributed across this broader ecosystem.

There is also a strong argument for incorporating artificial intelligence companies into the conversation.

If a platform derives commercial value from Nigerian journalism, the publisher should have the right to negotiate compensation. If an AI company uses protected Nigerian content extensively to train a commercial system, creators and rights holders should similarly have mechanisms through which they can negotiate licensing arrangements.

This is where the question of digital sovereignty becomes important.

Digital sovereignty does not mean shutting Nigeria off from the global internet or imposing unreasonable restrictions on technology companies. It means ensuring that participation in the digital economy does not automatically require Nigeria to surrender the economic value of its information, creativity, and intellectual property.

Nigeria must not wait for the newsroom to disappear

There is an uncomfortable lesson in Australia’s experience. Governments often intervene only after an industry has suffered significant damage.

By the time policy makers recognise that newspapers have lost advertising revenue, investigative desks have disappeared, and regional newsrooms have closed, rebuilding the ecosystem becomes considerably more difficult.

Nigeria should therefore approach the issue as an economic and democratic question rather than merely a dispute between publishers and technology companies.

A healthy democracy requires journalists capable of investigating governments, businesses, and powerful individuals. It requires reporters who can travel beyond the major cities and tell the stories of communities that rarely make national headlines. It requires editors capable of verifying information before it reaches millions of citizens.

None of that happens for free.

If the digital economy continues to concentrate advertising revenue and audience power in a handful of global platforms while the cost of producing credible journalism remains with Nigerian media organisations, the country will eventually have to confront the consequences.

Australia has chosen regulation and mandatory bargaining as one response to that challenge. Whether the model succeeds fully remains to be seen. But the principle behind it is difficult to ignore: those who derive substantial economic value from journalism should contribute to sustaining the journalism ecosystem.

For Nigeria, the opportunity is to learn from Australia’s experiment rather than wait for its own media crisis to become irreversible. The country needs a digital policy that protects innovation while also protecting the institutions that produce the information on which democracy depends.

The future question may therefore not be whether Big Tech should pay for Nigerian journalism. It may be whether Nigeria can afford not to.

And that precisely is the position being advanced by Professor Ojo Emmanuel Ademola, Africa’s first Professor of Cybersecurity and Information Technology Management,