South Africa’s communications regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), announced on Monday that it will investigate the prices charged for digital media and communications services such as Netflix and Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp. The move matters to anyone who pays a monthly subscription for streaming or uses WhatsApp for personal or business messaging, because any price adjustment could show up on the next bill.
Both Netflix and WhatsApp are examples of over-the-top (OTT) services, content or messaging delivered over the internet without going through the traditional telephone network. OTT services have become a staple for households and for small enterprises that rely on WhatsApp Business to contact customers. Because the regulator is looking at the cost of these services, the outcome could change the price that end users pay.
According to Business Day, ICASA will also launch a separate inquiry into the cost of telecommunications services offered by the country’s four largest operators, MTN, Vodacom, Telkom and Cell C. The regulator’s spokeswoman did not answer a Bloomberg call outside normal business hours, so no comment was obtained on the timing or the exact scope of the investigations.
Telecommunications-service costs in South Africa are among the highest in the world. The current probe builds on earlier reviews that followed the allocation of high-speed internet spectrum and the introduction of competition measures. Those earlier reviews looked at data-service pricing and monitored how the market responded to new capacity.
The investigation comes after the communications minister asked experts to identify policies and interventions that could help lower prices. While the minister’s name was not disclosed in the report, the request signals that the government is aware of the pressure that high bills place on households and on businesses that depend on affordable connectivity.
For consumers, a regulator-driven price reduction could mean lower monthly fees for streaming movies or for sending messages. For small businesses that use WhatsApp to coordinate orders, any increase in the service’s cost could squeeze already tight margins. On the other hand, telecom operators may see revenue pressure if the regulator forces them to cut prices, which could affect investment in network upgrades.
What remains unclear is how ICASA will conduct the price reviews, what methodology it will use and when any decisions will be announced. The regulator has not set a timetable, and the impact will depend on the specific findings of the probe.
Why bundling OTT services with telcos in one probe is a deliberate choice
Investigating over-the-top services like Netflix and WhatsApp alongside the mobile operators that carry their traffic reflects a regulatory reality that has become common globally: a streaming or messaging service’s real-world cost to a consumer is inseparable from the data price charged by the network it runs on, so a regulator focused only on subscription fees while ignoring data costs would be examining half the picture. South Africa’s data pricing has drawn international scrutiny before, including in a 2019 Competition Commission market inquiry that found data costs here compared unfavourably with other African markets at the time. This new ICASA probe effectively extends that same scrutiny to the content and messaging layer sitting on top of the network, treating the full cost stack, not just the headline subscription price, as the relevant unit of analysis.
South African households and SMEs have direct experience of how thin the boundary between telecom pricing and OTT pricing actually is: a family or a small business often decides how much data to buy each month based on which apps they need to run reliably, meaning a change in either the underlying data tariff or a specific app’s own subscription fee changes the same monthly budget line from two different directions. Regulators elsewhere, including in parts of the European Union, have already moved toward treating connectivity and the services that depend on it as a single market for competition purposes rather than two separate ones, and ICASA’s combined probe suggests South Africa’s regulator may be moving toward that same framing.
