The Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) has released guidelines on how it plans to promote competition in the markets it governs.
The guidelines are based on the hotly contested Chapter 10 of the Electronic Communications Act (ECA), which the Department of Communications (DOC) plans to overhaul. Competition regulation has been the bane of the regulator, specifically in the telecoms space, where operators previously managed to dodge competition clampdowns.
One of the larger problems is that Chapter 10 forces the regulator to carry out long-winded and costly studies of the markets it regulates, before it can declare any given market anti-competitive.
ICASA's chairman, Paris Mashile, last year called on the DOC to consider amending the Act. At the time, he said high communication costs in SA could be traced back to the “labyrinth” of the Act.
DOC director-general Mamodupi Mohlala late last year agreed that the regulator was hamstrung when it came to regulating competition, specifically since Chapter 10 made it difficult to get anything on the table.
Mohlala explained that the department planned to make amendments by the end of the DOC's financial year, which ends in the middle of this year.
The regulator plans to continue with exhaustive studies on markets that are suspected to be anti-competitive and will research how those markets can be changed. While the regulator is pre-empting the DOC's changes, it is making no allowances for amendments in its new guidelines.
In the document, the authority has declared the right to demand documentation from any company that falls under its jurisdiction that does not necessarily fall into the public domain. This has long been a problem for the regulator, with the latest interconnect debacle a prime example.
The regulator seems to have made some progress in addressing the possible changes in the ECA, saying the document is only a guideline and can be changed or updated from time to time.
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