If there was one message that emerged from Telemedia Johannesburg‘s discussion on regulation, it was that South Africa’s digital economy has outgrown many of the silos that once defined it.
The country’s regulatory framework remains widely regarded as one of the most mature in Africa, helping to create a trusted environment for operators, content providers, merchants and consumers alike. Yet as digital services increasingly blur the boundaries between telecommunications, payments, streaming, gaming, social media, advertising and ecommerce, the question facing the industry is whether traditional regulatory structures can continue to keep pace.
The panel at the show brought together representatives from across the regulatory and commercial landscape, including Lorato Schoombee, account manager at Digital Virgo; Makhwasane Matjeke, senior manager for regulatory development and research at the Film and Publication Board (FPB); Mmabotho Schubert, business development manager at Gameloft and WASPA board member; Dominic Cull, attorney at Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions; and Dr Tshifhiwa Maumela, councillor at ICASA.
While the panellists approached the issue from different perspectives, there was broad agreement that the future requires greater collaboration between regulators, industry and technology specialists if South Africa is to maintain its position as one of Africa’s leading digital markets.
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Trust remains the foundation
From the commercial perspective, regulation is ultimately about creating trust. Digital Virgo’s Schoombee argues that a healthy digital ecosystem is one where consumers feel safe and protected while businesses feel confident enough to invest. Trust, she says, has to exist throughout the customer lifecycle, from acquisition and subscription through to billing, customer care and cancellation processes.
Consumers need transparency around pricing, clear consent mechanisms and easy access to support. At the same time, investors and international partners need confidence that markets are stable, predictable and professionally managed.
That trust has become one of South Africa’s competitive advantages. Throughout Telemedia Johannesburg, speakers repeatedly highlighted how the country’s combination of operator governance, self-regulation and established business practices has helped create a market that many international providers regard as one of the safest and most reliable environments in Africa. Schoombee notes that transparency, customer protection and quality compliance frameworks are often what determine whether international merchants choose to invest in a market.
The digital economy no longer fits neat categories
That’s the business perspective, what about how consumers approach the market? A recurring theme throughout the discussion was that consumers no longer experience digital services as separate industries.
A user might watch video content, play a game, make a payment, engage with advertising, use social media and subscribe to a digital service within a single session on their smartphone. Yet many regulatory structures were created at a time when those activities existed in distinct sectors.
Gameloft/WASPA’s Schubert believes this convergence creates one of the biggest challenges facing regulators.
“The consumer doesn’t just go into a telecoms environment or a payments environment,” she explains. Instead, they encounter all these services simultaneously through a single digital experience. Behind the scenes, operators, content providers, payment companies and regulators are all attempting to navigate different legal and compliance frameworks while ultimately serving the same customer.
The result is a digital economy that increasingly overlaps traditional regulatory boundaries.
Are existing frameworks evolving? According to Schubert, yes. Are they evolving as quickly as technology itself? Probably not.
That challenge is not unique to South Africa. Around the world, regulators are wrestling with the reality that innovation often moves significantly faster than legislation.
Content regulation becomes more complex
Nowhere is this more apparent than in content regulation. Matjeke points out that content was once relatively easy to define. Films, videos, games and publications existed in identifiable formats and travelled through relatively predictable distribution channels.
Today, content is generated, distributed and consumed in fundamentally different ways.
Streaming services, social media, cloud gaming, user-generated content and AI-generated media have dramatically expanded both the volume and complexity of digital content. The challenge is no longer simply regulating professional publishers but increasingly addressing harmful content created and distributed by ordinary users themselves.
Matjeke, from the Film and Publication Board of South Africa, says the rise of AI-generated content presents particularly difficult challenges. Deepfake technologies and image manipulation tools allow bad actors to create harmful content at unprecedented speed and scale. What was once a content regulation issue has become part technology issue, part consumer protection issue and part platform governance issue.
Trust, he argues, increasingly depends on how platforms themselves are designed. A platform that asks users to confirm their age but makes no meaningful effort to verify it cannot reasonably claim to prioritise consumer protection. The concept of “safety by design” is therefore becoming increasingly important as regulators seek ways to balance innovation with public protection.
Why self-regulation still matters
One of the strongest arguments to emerge from the session was the continuing importance of self-regulation.
Schubert describes WASPA as a bridge between statutory regulation and industry realities. Unlike formal legislative processes, self-regulatory organisations can often move faster, identifying problems before they become widespread and adapting rules more quickly than government bodies typically can.
Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions’ Cull agrees, arguing with his attorney’s hat on that South Africa’s industry associations have generally demonstrated how self-regulation can complement statutory regulation rather than compete with it.
Using WASPA’s longstanding relationship with the Film and Publication Board as an example, Cull says the association has successfully taken responsibility for a specific area of digital services regulation while remaining accountable to the broader legislative framework established by government.
The result is what he describes as a “mutually beneficial arrangement, where industry gains certainty and clear operating rules, while regulators gain oversight and accountability without needing to manage every operational detail themselves”.
This model has helped South Africa avoid some of the regulatory fragmentation seen elsewhere and is increasingly being viewed as a template for other African markets.
The challenge of regulator-to-regulator collaboration
Yet while collaboration between regulators and industry appears relatively mature, several speakers suggested that coordination between regulators themselves remains more challenging.
Cull argues that one of South Africa’s biggest regulatory hurdles is that different government departments and regulatory bodies often operate within mandates written decades ago.
ICASA, the Film and Publication Board, the Information Regulator, the Competition Commission, the Advertising Regulatory Board and several other bodies all have legitimate responsibilities within the digital economy. However, those responsibilities increasingly overlap as digital services converge.
Questions such as who regulates online content, streaming services, AI-generated media or digital platforms do not always have straightforward answers.
To address this, regulators have begun working more closely through initiatives such as the ICT Regulators Forum, bringing together multiple agencies to better coordinate their approaches. The goal is not necessarily to eliminate existing regulators but to create greater alignment between them.
Time for a Digital Economy Act?
The most provocative suggestion came from Cull, who argued that South Africa may eventually need something akin to a Digital Economy Act.
While he believes existing telecoms legislation remains robust, he notes that much of it was written before the emergence of modern digital platforms, AI, streaming services and today’s highly interconnected online ecosystems.
Current legislation, he says, is excellent at regulating the infrastructure – the “plumbing” – but less effective at dealing with the content, services and digital business models flowing through those pipes.
A future Digital Economy Act could potentially provide a unified framework for addressing AI, OTT platforms, online content, digital commerce and emerging technologies in a more holistic manner.
Not everyone agrees that entirely new legislation is required.
Dr Maumela from the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), the body charged with regulating the country’s elecommunications, broadcasting, and postal sectors offers a more technical perspective, arguing that many of today’s services were already contemplated within broader communications frameworks. The challenge, he suggests, is often less about replacing legislation and more about properly understanding how evolving technologies fit within existing regulatory structures.
Yet even this difference of opinion points to the same underlying reality: the digital economy is becoming increasingly difficult to regulate through isolated sector-specific approaches.
Bringing technology back into regulation
Perhaps the most surprising consensus of the session concerned the need for more technical expertise within regulatory discussions.
Dr Maumela – a trained electrical engineer and pioneer of developing AI systems in South Africa – argues that regulation has increasingly become dominated by legal and policy perspectives while technical voices have become less prominent.
If regulators are to address challenges such as AI, platform governance, cybersecurity, content moderation and digital identity, they will need engineers, computer scientists and technology specialists working alongside lawyers and policymakers, he says.
“The digital economy is ultimately built on technology. Understanding how that technology works is becoming just as important as understanding the legislation surrounding it,” he believes.
A global challenge, not just a South African one
Although the discussion focused on South Africa, many of the issues raised are increasingly global.
Every major market is wrestling with questions around AI governance, platform accountability, online harms, digital advertising, streaming regulation and the growing convergence between telecoms, media, payments and ecommerce.
What makes South Africa particularly interesting is that it already possesses many of the ingredients needed to address those challenges: strong self-regulation, established statutory regulators, active industry participation and a culture of collaboration.
The next step may be moving beyond thinking about telecommunications, content, payments and advertising as separate sectors altogether.
The future digital economy will not operate in silos. Regulation may ultimately need to reflect that reality.
Whether that takes the form of a Digital Economy Act, stronger regulator collaboration or expanded self-regulatory frameworks remains to be seen. What was clear from Telemedia Johannesburg, however, is that the conversation has already begun.
