Briefs & Analysis

Analysis of competition law developments in Africa.

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AfricaEuropeGlobalDigital Markets

Borrowed Remedies: Generative AI, News Content and the Limits of Regulatory Diffusion Beyond the Enforcement Centres

Between December 2025 and July 2026, competition authorities in the EU, Brazil, the UK and Nigeria all moved against AI tools that summarise news without permission or payment. The theory of harm spread fast; the power to enforce a remedy did not. Most authorities lack the legal reach, the staff or the market size to make a global platform comply, so a publisher in Lagos is protected, if at all, by a rule made in London and by Google's own choice to roll it out worldwide. And what gets borrowed is a control to opt out, not a right to be paid.

Omowonuola AdekanmbiNov 9, 202641 min readRead →

AfricaEuropeRegulatory Policy
Green Cartels, Brown Costs: Who bears the premium when a competition authority widens the beneficiary class for climate?
Competition law will normally exempt an agreement between competitors only where the consumers in the market that the agreement affects receive a fair share of the resulting benefit. For climate change agreements specifically, the UK Competition and Markets Authority relaxes that condition. It weighs the benefits to all UK consumers, not only those in the affected market. In April 2026, Nigeria's Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission published an exposure draft adopting the same position. Europe has spent three years building a doctrinal accommodation for climate agreements, and the United Kingdom built the widest version of it. Nigeria has now taken that version. This brief reads the Nigerian draft against its European antecedents and argues that the out-of-market extension rests on an unexamined assumption. The assumption is that the population paying the green premium and the population receiving the climate benefit are substantially the same people. In the United Kingdom, that assumption is defensible. In markets for fertiliser, electricity and cooking fuel across much of Africa, it is not. Nothing in section 2.1.4 requires the Commission to ask who bears the premium, and the draft's own worked example at paragraph 21 shows how hard the widened class is to apply once a real agreement has to be resolved. This brief proposes four amendments, of which the first is an incidence condition on the out-of-market extension. Making them now, while no final instrument has been issued, is a drafting exercise. Making them after a continental authority has written its own guidance on the same model will be considerably harder.
Omowonuola Adekanmbi • Sep 23, 2026 • 28 min read
EuropeAfricaDigital Markets
Parallel Enforcement at the Digital Gateway: A Comparative Analysis of the Meta/WhatsApp Abuse of Dominance investigations in the EU and COMESA
Meta faces parallel abuse-of-dominance investigations in the EU and COMESA over revised WhatsApp Business terms that shut third-party AI providers out of the platform's API while privileging Meta's own AI. The European Commission is proceeding under Article 102 TFEU, sidestepping the Digital Markets Act because WhatsApp Business is not a designated core platform service, and is weighing rare interim measures of the kind last seen in Broadcom. COMESA's Competition and Consumer Commission, meanwhile, has opened its first-ever abuse-of-dominance case under its reformed 2025 Regulations. The two regimes converge in treating gatekeeping of AI market access as a serious competition concern, but diverge sharply on dominance thresholds and remedial powers, signalling a structural shift toward parallel, multi-jurisdictional platform enforcement in which African regulators are now active participants.
Omowonuola Adekanmbi • May 27, 2026 • 17 min read
AfricaMerger Control
Navigating Overlapping Jurisdictions in African Merger Control: National, REC, and AfCFTA Regimes
African mergers increasingly trigger overlapping notifications across national authorities, regional economic communities (COMESA, EACCA, ECOWAS, WAEMU), and a forthcoming AfCFTA continental regime, with no binding mechanism to resolve conflicts. This article maps the three layers and proposes binding referral protocols between the CCCC and EACCA, AfCFTA-mandated threshold harmonisation across RECs, and a pan-African merger notification portal.
Omowonuola Adekanmbi • Apr 28, 2026 • 21 min read
GlobalRegulatory Policy
The Bad Behaviour Rule Book: EU's New Guidelines
The EU's Draft Guidelines on Article 102 TFEU shift from effects-based enforcement to a presumption-heavy framework, posing critical questions for African competition authorities. This article argues that African regulators should resist wholesale adoption of the EU model and instead develop contextually appropriate hybrid enforcement frameworks tailored to developing-market realities.
Omowonuola Adekanmbi • Mar 7, 2026 • 12 min read
GlobalMarket Studies
Welcome to The Competition Brief
Introducing The Competition Brief, a platform dedicated to rigorous analysis of competition law developments across Africa and Europe.
Omowonuola Adekanmbi • Jan 29, 2026 • 3 min read

Borrowed Remedies: Generative AI, News Content and the Limits of Regulatory Diffusion Beyond the Enforcement Centres

Green Cartels, Brown Costs: Who bears the premium when a competition authority widens the beneficiary class for climate?

Parallel Enforcement at the Digital Gateway: A Comparative Analysis of the Meta/WhatsApp Abuse of Dominance investigations in the EU and COMESA

Navigating Overlapping Jurisdictions in African Merger Control: National, REC, and AfCFTA Regimes

The Bad Behaviour Rule Book: EU's New Guidelines

Welcome to The Competition Brief