Parliament will this week get its teeth into the controversial Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Bill as the Portfolio Committee on Communications starts the public review of the proposed law.
Tomorrow and Wednesday were originally earmarked for the public to make presentations to the committee, but the hearings may be extended due to high levels of interest and concern about the current form of the Bill.
Not all of the parties that have submitted written comment or will be making oral presentations have made their submissions public yet, but at least one large company is to call for an extension of the process. The company will ask that the Bill be published for further public comment once the Portfolio Committee has completed its review. Doing so would in effect treat the current Bill as a White Paper, a normal legislative step that was skipped in order to fast track the Bill through Parliament.
Although the date for written submissions has already been extended to mid-last week, from the original 20 April deadline, it is still expected that the Bill will be passed into law in early-July.
Written submissions made public thus far give a good indication of the controversial nature of the Bill, which various parties have called dangerous, ill-drafted and over-ambitious.
The Cape Telecommunications Users` Forum has called for five of the 14 chapters of the current Bill to be scrapped completely, while the Free Market Foundation of Southern Africa has called for eight chapters to be deleted.
Both parties agree the chapters are redundant, unjustifiable or not warranted, and include provisions on a "national e-strategy", the registration of cryptography providers, government control over critical databases and the establishment of "cyber inspectors".
Both also express severe reservations about a chapter which seeks to put the .za domain under government control, something the designated controlling body, Namespace ZA, strenuously disagrees with in great detail in its own submission.
Other questions to be raised during the public discussion include an apparent power-grab by the Department of Communications, which has assigned itself wide-ranging responsibilities throughout the Bill, as well as details of consumer protection and electronic signature provisions.
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