Poison Ivy and Stockholm Syndrome
- This column was first published in Brainstorm magazine, South Africa, on 1 September 2007. They keep me in bread, beer and bacon, so I’d appreciate it if you’d consider subscribing.
There are finally signs that the long-frozen telecoms sector is thawing. Now everyone’s thanking the government. That’s twisted.
A celebratory message arrived recently: one side of a particular road was being trenched by Neotel, while the other was being dug up by MTN. Great news indeed, if only because it proves that the space-time continuum doesn’t implode when two competitors dig up the same road.
Similar good-news stories appeared elsewhere. A company named Seacom is building a new undersea cable. Vodacom says it wants a meerkat in every telecoms hole it can find. Every second VANS operator is swindling reporters into believing it’s a historic first, the next-big-thing in infrastructure. Talk of new interconnect regulations, industry consolidation, self-provision and new pay TV licences spices up dinner parties, and pundits get drunk on the heady mead of price wars and dark fibre.
The cause is the new Electronic Communications Act, which though still a vague piece of legislation is making it possible for some enterprising companies to squeeze through some gaps. So we find ourselves celebrating – finally – the culmination of “managed liberalisation”.
But why? There’s something deeply pathological in our reaction.
