FMF: Icasa’s intervention into data ‘ludicrous’
The Free Market Foundation has described the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa’s (Icasa) draft regulations on expiring data as “overreach”.
The foundation’s executive director, Leon Louw, says the regulator is treading on dangerous ground.
Icasa is planning to change the End-user and Subscriber Service Charter Regulations to prevent telecommunications operators from expiring users' data for up to 24 months.
“For them [Icasa] to tell us what we should buy and what contracts should be at our disposal, is as ludicrous as expecting a little group of grey bureaucrats to tell us what groceries or clothes to buy,” says Louw.
“It’s ludicrous to think that there can be regulators making this decisions better than consumers freely purchasing from freely competing suppliers in a free market. It’s got nothing to do with whether they may – they just can’t, is simply not possible. To put it bluntly -it’s stupid,” says Louw.
“What you paid for is a data package that lapses, you can pay more and get a package that doesn’t laps,” Louw contends.