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Icasa to investigate WhatsApp’s impact in SA

South Africa’s Independent Communications Authority (Icasa) says it will be launching a probe into the impact that Over the Top (OTT) services like WhatsApp could have in South Africa.

Icasa made presentations to Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Postal Services and Telecommunications yesterday, durig which mobile operators MTN and Vodacom argued that OTT services need to be regulated in the country.

Willington Ngwepe, the Chief Operations Officer of Icasa, said that the government body will be spending the next two years investigating.

“Our plan is that the next financial year, we will be conducting an inquiry into priority markets… We intend to look into data services next and as part of that, we will consider the possible impact of OTTs on the market. OTT services result in increased use of bandwidth, increased use of data networks and data,” he said.

During Icasa’s presentation to the Committee, CEO Pakamile Pongwana urged operators not to stifle innovation.

“Allow innovation to happen… and deal with the bottlenecks. The bottleneck we are experiencing today is … our holding back spectrum,”Pongwana said.

“It is a bottleneck because networks could have grown further, OTTs could have grown further, people could have benefitted better. The fundamental principle is that regulation tends to be about control. We want to control something, that is why we have regulation, or we want to just remove the bottleneck.”

On the back of that, Pongwana questioned whether the complaining entities want enable innovation, or simply regulate it.

“The question that will come all the time is ‘do you enable or do you regulate?’ Enabling sometimes is about facilitating those that can facilitate the faster growth of our economy and our country,” he said.

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