Innovation

Samantha Perry

If you’ve spent any time in the trenches of South African telecoms over the last 30 years, you’ll know the script by heart – a tragedy in three acts. In Act I, we draft world-class, pro-competitive legislation that may look great on PowerPoint, but in Act II, we fail to implement the pro-competitive bits while getting bogged down in litigation and institutional lethargy. In Act III, the consumer pays some of the highest data costs on the continent. We are currently before the opening curtain of the AI era, and the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT) has issued, and then swiftly withdrawn, its Draft National AI Policy.

In the telecoms liberalisation era, we patted ourselves on the back for the Electronic Communications Act (ECA), a piece of legislation that was meant to blow the market wide open. Yet, the most potent pro-competitive tools in that toolbox – market reviews, essential facilities leasing regulations, functional unbundling, and agile spectrum management – largely sat, and sit, gathering dust.