ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS: ICASA TO CONDUCT INQUIRY INTO INDIVIDUAL NETWORK SERVICE LICENSING MARKET IMPLICATIONS

ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS: ICASA TO CONDUCT INQUIRY INTO INDIVIDUAL NETWORK SERVICE LICENSING MARKET IMPLICATIONS

• 22 August 2025
• Communications & Digital Technologies
• SA Legal Academy

The Department of Communications & Digital Technologies has gazetted a ministerial directive requiring the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) to conduct an inquiry into the merits or otherwise of licensing individual electronic communications network service providers in the context of competition and universal access imperatives underpinning the 2005 Electronic Communications Act. This is noting that:

• the Act’s sub-section 5(6) provides that ICASA ‘may only accept and consider applications for individual electronic communications network services licences in terms of a policy direction issued by the Minister in terms of section 3’.
• this provision ‘was included in the Act in the context of liberalisation but has been overtaken by market developments’
• to circumvent sub-section 5(6), individual electronic communications network services licences are being traded, limiting ICASA’s role to ‘considering applications for licence transfers’
• as a result, ‘a high number of individual electronic communications network services licences have already been granted and may be transferred’, and that
• there are concerns that this may not have improved competition and the universal provision of electronic communications networks and services.

Against that backdrop, the ministerial directive requires ICASA to commence an inquiry within three months with the aim of determining:

• if licence trading/transfer ‘has been effective and efficient with regard to the promotion of competition within the sector’
• whether there is, indeed, a ‘demand for and need to invite, accept and consider applications for new individual electronic communications network services licences’
• ‘whether or not and how new individual electronic communications network service licences … (would) contribute to (the) universal provision of electronic communications networks’, and
• ‘whether the benefits of new individual electronic communications network service licences (would) outweigh all costs (entailed), including (the cost of) monitoring and enforcing compliance … (as well as) the burden on the environment.’

The findings of this inquiry will guide Communications & Digital Technologies Minister Solly Malatsi in the process of deciding whether or not to issue a directive enabling ICASA to invite applications for individual electronic communications network service licences, as required by the Act’s sub-section 5(6).

The move follows a notice gazetted in May 2025 apparently calling for input on proposals along these lines. However, the notice on which SA Legal Academy reported at the time appeared to be a final directive. It may have been replaced surreptitiously by one calling for public comments, although there is no way of ascertaining this.

• latest Government Gazette notice directing ICASA to conduct an inquiry
• SA Legal Academy 21 May 2025 report (apparently erroneous)

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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