Every wireless network in the country needs a licence, or an explicit exemption, if a recent draft of regulations issued by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa is read correctly. So say telecoms lawyers Mike Silber and Dominic Cull who recently floated the idea of flooding the regulator with applications for exemptions from thousands of corporate LAN and home WiFi network owners. Designed to give force to the Electronic Communications Act that replaced the old Telecommunications Act, the new regulations are a perfect illustration of the unintended consequences of the regulatory state.

The real problem here is not just bad regulation. The real problem is the philosophy of our telecoms law, which is summed up succinctly in section seven of chapter three of the Act: "Except for services exempted in terms of section [six], no person may provide any service without a licence." That the term "service" is defined extremely broadly in the Act isn't even the primary problem. The problem is that no service is legal without prior permission and licensing by the government. Want to come up with a new idea? First ask the regulator whether they'll issue a licence for it. Then pay the licence fee. Or pay another fee to be formally exempted from needing to obtain a licence. The entire philosophy is backwards.