This week, South Africa's communications regulator, Icasa, finally started its engine for reducing the absurdly high cost of data. It will accept submissions until the end of next month to assist in its investigation. The premise of the exercise is "to identify priority markets in the electronic communications sector", with a view to imposing "appropriate and sufficient pro-competitive licence conditions on licensees where there is ineffective competition, and if any licensee has significant market power in such markets". The market study will be followed by a discussion document and public hearings before publication of a findings document. Only then will remedies, if any, be announced. That is commendable, but Icasa would save itself a lot of trouble if it replaced the complex investigation of market forces with simple arithmetic. The same arithmetic would have forestalled the embarrassing failures of high-profile campaigns to bring down the cost of data. Both the #DataMustFall an...

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