AfCFTA digital gatekeeper regulation enables sanctions without proving market dominance

This regulatory shift lowers the evidentiary bar for African authorities to intervene in digital platform operations, moving away from complex dominance assessments toward faster ex-ante enforcement. For streaming services and digital infrastructure providers, this means compliance will hinge on relational bargaining power rather than just total market share. The ecosystem may see increased scrutiny of price parity and intermediation services, potentially favoring local SMEs over global incumbents. As the AfCFTA Competition Authority becomes operational, stakeholders should watch for the specific designation criteria in Article 11(5) to determine which platforms will face the strictest per se prohibitions.

The AfCFTA Competition Policy Protocol represents a broader continental effort to harmonize digital market regulation across 54 member states. In March 2025, the African Union Commission and AfCFTA Secretariat jointly published implementation guidelines for the Protocol's digital economy provisions, which outline a phased timeline for establishing the AfCFTA Competition Authority with enforcement powers expected to become operational by 2027. The Protocol's approach to economic dependence mirrors provisions already active in several national frameworks. South Africa's Competition Amendment Act of 2023 introduced buyer power provisions targeting dominant platforms' treatment of smaller suppliers, and Kenya's Competition Authority has applied similar abuse-of-dependence standards to digital intermediaries since 2022. These national precedents suggest that Article 11's per se prohibitions will draw on existing enforcement experience rather than operating in a regulatory vacuum. On the business and licensing front, the AfCFTA digital gatekeeper regulation arrives as African digital markets attract significant investment and face growing scrutiny over platform conduct. In July 2025, Nigeria's Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission opened an investigation into app store commission structures affecting local content providers, signaling that national regulators are already testing the boundaries of platform power before the continental authority becomes operational. The EU's Digital Markets Act, which entered full enforcement in March 2024, has served as a reference point for AfCFTA drafters. Leonard Ugbajah, a competition law scholar at the University of Cape Town, noted in a 2025 working paper that Article 11 deliberately avoids replicating the DMA's quantitative designation thresholds, instead favoring qualitative assessments of economic dependence that may prove more adaptable to markets with limited data infrastructure. From a technical and operational standpoint, streaming platforms and digital infrastructure providers operating across African markets face a fragmented compliance landscape that Article 11 aims to consolidate. A 2025 study by the African Digital Rights Network found that 14 African countries had enacted or proposed digital platform regulations with conflicting definitions of gatekeeper status, creating compliance costs that disproportionately affect smaller regional services. The AfCFTA Protocol's harmonization goal could reduce those costs if the Competition Authority issues binding designation criteria under Article 11(5). For video streaming specifically, the economic dependence framework may target practices such as exclusive content licensing arrangements and algorithmic recommendation systems that lock in user attention. Kenya's Competition Authority fined a major digital payments platform in November 2024 for imposing exclusivity clauses on merchants, establishing a precedent that could extend to streaming intermediaries operating under similar contractual structures across AfCFTA member states.