Communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri had a tough time with the third cellular licensing saga. Her authority was challenged, she was called to justify herself in court and her reputation was probably permanently scarred.
The trouble is that some things simply cannot be legislated into being.
Phillip de Wet, News editor, ITWeb
She blamed much of the fiasco on the SA Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (SATRA), then the government body looking after the telecoms sector.
Even before Cell C eventually got its licence SATRA was history, replaced by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA). The former chairman is now a consultant in Washington and only one of his other councillors survived the changeover.
But ICASA has since shown that it takes its mandate seriously and believes there are more direct ways to protect consumer interest than playing footsie with government. This should worry Matsepe-Casaburri. She has one more controversial licence to be handed out early next year, a licence she and her colleagues in government have very fixed ideas about, if you`ll excuse the pun.
The limits of legislation
The trouble is that some things simply cannot be legislated into being. The Communications Ministry can, and has, assured that Sentech will get its international gateway licence when the Telecoms Act is updated. This is despite the fact that everybody bar Sentech thinks the licence is a really bad idea. It can, and has, ensured that nasty and bothersome technology such as voice over IP will not cause problems for its favourite operator.
However, legislation cannot pretend to be regulation. It cannot lay down the law in the day-to-day running of competition between the various operators, despite the firm ideas Matsepe-Casaburri has on such matters. It cannot determine who is to get the licence to run the second national operator, despite the fact that government will favour M-Cell in which it still holds a stake.
But legislation does determine who runs the regulator. It does not take rocket science to see why Matsepe-Casaburri has written into her amendment bill much increased powers for herself at the expense of ICASA. If passed unchanged, the Bill could potentially allow her to remove ICASA councillors pretty much at will, replace them with whomever she pleases and tie the body up in endless bureaucracy.
ICASA has noticed and turned to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications for salvation. The latter, however, has bigger problems on its collective mind at the moment. It has a very, very tight deadline to pass the Amendment Bill: failing to do so will seriously annoy Cabinet when Telkom is not listed on time. Before that can be done, it needs to prevent the Bill from killing the Internet as we know it, a matter it has rightly assigned a higher priority to.
The consequences
Let`s assume for a second that the Communications Ministry does indeed get an iron hold on the throat of the regulator. What are the consequences?
Most immediate and obvious are the price hikes we can expect in phone tariffs. ICASA tends to be tough on operators that ask for big increases, even if they can justify such requests. The ministry, on the other hand, invariably finds itself more sympathetic to big business than to consumers.
The Internet industry could expect tough times. In running battles with Telkom, Internet providers often found ICASA fulfilling the role of a kindly uncle which would help if it could, although circumstances do not always permit.
The move away from regulating technology and towards regulating services would also be nipped in the bud. ICASA wants to give the markets freedom: government knows which technologies it wants to promote and which technologies it wishes would just go away. In fact, it seems to have a positive hatred for some techniques.
There are also implications for the IT industry beyond the Internet. As Derek Wilcocks of Internet Solutions recently pointed out, Telkom now considers itself a systems integrator. There is nothing stopping it from selling desktop systems, software and just about everything else it can think of.
Telkom has the advantage here, partly due to the regulations which, among other things, give it nearly sole right to sell full voice and data networks.
It is the job of the regulator to balance out that kind of advantage. Anyone who is willing to bet his business on a tame ICASA doing so is welcome to contact me. I happen to have a mint condition bridge available, going cheap.
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