ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS: DRAFT AMENDMENT BILL RELEASED FOR COMMENT

ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS: DRAFT AMENDMENT BILL RELEASED FOR COMMENT

• 03 August 2023
• Communications & Digital Technologies
• SA Legal Academy

Please note: On 3 August 2023, the Department of Communications & Digital Technologies gazetted a notice extending the deadline for input to 31 August 2023.

Input is sought by 23 July 2023 on a draft Electronic Communications Amendment Bill intended, among other things, to respond to recommendations in the Competition Commission’s 2019 data services market inquiry report.

The draft Bill also seeks to give practical effect to the 2016 ICT White Paper, presumably building on an iteration tabled in Parliament in 2018 and withdrawn the following year.

At the time, this decision was informed by stakeholder submissions during public hearings, when it became clear that more consultations with industry role players would be required to adequately address a plethora of issues apparently overlooked by the Bill’s drafting team. Then Minister of Communications & Postal Services Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams alluded to them in a letter to the National Assembly committee concerned.

Against that backdrop, according to a memorandum on the draft Bill’s objects it seeks to:

• ‘provide for a new licence category for electronic communications facilities services’
• ‘enable the Minister responsible for local government to make a national standard by-law on rapid deployment’
• ‘enable spectrum sharing’
• ‘regulate roaming and mobile virtual network services’
• ‘improve the facilities leasing framework and its pricing principles’, and
• provide for improved competition regulation’.

Please click the links below for more information:

• draft Bill
• data services market inquiry report (summary)
• ICT White Paper
• withdrawn 2018 Bill
• letter from former Minister

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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