Google is king in South Africa

Google Chrome is the dominant browser in South Africa, but its parent company, Alphabet, faces extreme regulatory challenges locally and internationally.

Data from Statcounter Global Stats shows that Chrome’s total market share in South Africa is 72.88%. This is a substantial increase from the 52.32% seen in March 2018.

South Africa’s preference for Google Chrome is higher than the worldwide average, where the Alphabet-owned company has a 66.16% market share.

Chrome’s largest local and international competitor is Apple’s Safari, which has 10.73% market share in South Africa and 17.62% globally.

Moreover, a deeper dive into the browsers shows that Google’s dominance in internet browsing is far deeper than the Chrome figure suggests.

Notably, Google paid Apple R20 billion to set Google Search as the default on Safari. However, the move is now in court, with Google accused of breaking antitrust laws and creating a search monopoly.

In South Africa, Samsung Internet completes the podium at 7.59%. Notably, Samsung Internet is a Chromium-based web browser for Android smartphones developed by Samsung.

Fourth place is Opera, at 3.89%, which uses the Google Search engine by default and is also Chromium-based. Microsoft Edge is in fifth at 2.93% and also uses Google’s Chromium.

Firefox is sixth at 1.17%. Although Mozilla’s Firefox is not Chromium-based, it still uses Google’s search engine as its default.

This means that Google’s products are generally used in the six largest browsers in South Africa, which hold over 95% of the market share.

Major changes for Google

In addition to US antitrust cases, Alphabet and other tech giants face increased pressure in South Africa.

The Competition Commission recently said that tech giants controlling digital platforms operating in South Africa must find a fair way to compensate local media companies or face a 5% to 10% tax.

The commission’s Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI) examined Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms in South Africa.

The inquiry was launched in October 2023 to investigate the imbalance between digital platforms and the news media in South Africa, with the latter facing heavy losses over the last decade.

The increased losses come despite far more users accessing information online via Google Search and platforms like YouTube, Facebook, X, and TikTok, as legacy media like newspapers decline.

Local publishers and media companies argue that digital platforms and their revenue streams are dominated by big tech companies, which harms local media production.

The commission said that while platforms like Google and Facebook increase viewership of online news sites, digital advertising revenue cannot compensate for the losses experienced by newer models.

The commission said that local news media benefits from traffic referrals from digital platforms to the value of R200 million.

However, a company like Google gets roughly R800 million from South African news content, creating an imbalance of about R600 million, the commission said.

It added that there should be short-term compensation between digital platforms and South African media, suggesting Google pay between R300 million and R500 million over three to five years to address lost revenue. 

Google has rejected this assessment, saying that it is outside of economic reality and does not reflect the value of news to Google’s business.

It added that forcing it to ‘artificially subsidise’ South Africa’s news industry based on this inaccurate assessment would ultimately restrict access to information, stifle innovation, and disrupt monetization and future investment

Goodbye Google.co.za

Outside of regulatory pressure, Google also recently announced that it is starting to redirect people who use its country-specific domains, such as Google.co.za, to its main Google.com portal.

Google said the change would be rolled out gradually over several months, but it did not say when specific domains would begin redirecting.

“Historically, as a part of our process to provide localised results, we’ve used country code top-level domain names (ccTLD), such as google.ng for Nigeria or google.com.br for Brazil,” it said.

“When you’re searching on Google, we aim to provide the most useful information, and many times that includes providing locally relevant search results.”

Nevertheless, Google said its ability to provide a local experience has improved dramatically in recent years. Due to the improvement, country-level domains are no longer necessary.

Users may need to re-enter some search preferences as the process rolls out in the coming months.