WhatsApp, Netflix, and YouTube could be forced to pay Vodacom and MTN in South Africa

Sounds like an intentional perversion of the law to me. What next, I must pay Bakers to expand their factory because I buy their bread. Must admit it does fit into the South African delusion of entitlement and double dipping though. Bottom line is the consumer pays these service providers for the services they use, the service providers have no other rights, and if they cannot provide the service they should be replaced by someone who can.
 
I guess If OTT companies must pay Vodacom and MTN, they in turn should get a share of the data sales . After all, the cellular companies profit out of data sold to those consuming the OTT services.
 
Help me out here, do we not pay these fuskers for the data we consume? Then I guess Eskom should also be paid because we charge our devices more when we stream - oh crap, did I just give Eskom an idea........
 
Word of the day.... How to be ridiculous.... O, wait, should actually say challenge accepted!
 
Bad Ballie said:
Sounds like an intentional perversion of the law to me. What next, I must pay Bakers to expand their factory because I buy their bread. Must admit it does fit into the South African delusion of entitlement and double dipping though. Bottom line is the consumer pays these service providers for the services they use, the service providers have no other rights, and if they cannot provide the service they should be replaced by someone who can.
Click to expand...
Stonemason said:
I guess If OTT companies must pay Vodacom and MTN, they in turn should get a share of the data sales . After all, the cellular companies profit out of data sold to those consuming the OTT services.
Click to expand...
Exactly. Looking at their financials these networks have already been paid by the users. Talking about fair share then I suppose we won't need to pay for data any more then?
 
This is a classic case of double-dipping.
This breaks the Net Neutrality principles.
Consumers already pay $$$ for data from Cell C, Liquid, Rain, Telkom, MTN, and Vodacom which they need to invest in infrastructure.
High quality content drives purchases of data and increased profit for these companies.
ACT members already get their fair share of income from consumers.
There is no evidence that the current consumer pays for data system is broken.
 
So if this happens does that mean we get to watch Netflix on MTN and Vodacom for free (no data charges)?
 
Rickster said:
Why only those 3 specific sites?

There are 100's of other services that "use their infrastructure".
Click to expand...
I was just thinking that. What about torrents, etc? I remember reading a while back that torrents account for quite a bit of traffic- 25% or something (this was a while ago, though).
 
Then MTN and Vodacom need them for the traffic they create for them...

This is completely absurd, just thieves wanting a piece of the pie.
 
One thing about this government and some of these corporates, they sure know how to screw consumers and citizens!michael-scott-michael-office.gif
 
Cool, so does that mean Vodacom and MTN are going to zero-rate Whatsapp, Netflix and Youtube data for users? No? Didn't think so.
 
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