MTN Faces Legal Challenge Over Zero-Rating PBOs Websites

MTN South Africa will face a legal challenge over its failure to follow its main rivals Vodacom and Telkom to zero-rate the local educational websites of public benefit organisations.

The DG Murray Trust has launched a court application to compel mobile network operator MTN to zero-rate the local educational websites of public benefit organisations.

The DG Murray Trust is a South African foundation committed to developing South Africa’s potential through public innovation and strategic investment.

The trust is represented by Dunster Attorneys Inc, which has applied to the Western Cape High Court for the case to be heard on 3 August 2020.

The application follows three months of engagement with the three largest network operators (Vodacom, MTN and Telkom Mobile) urging them to zero-rate these sites as a matter of urgency to ensure that the poorest 50% of children have some access to educational resources during the lockdown and over the next few months.

According to a 2016 survey conducted by the South African Development Council, close to 60% of families have no books in their homes other than religious texts and by 2018, only 10% of people said they had internet at home. Yet most children in informal settlements and rural areas have access to a feature phone, albeit with limited connectivity.

While wealthier schools have developed online learning platforms, these most children in South Africa cannot access them.

However, there are at least 50 public benefit organisations (PBOs) whose life’s work is to reach the poorest children with learning resources, books, stories, language and maths.

Many have designed their digital content to reach children and young people living in the poorest communities, delivered in bite-sized chunks and supported by SMS or basic chat functions. These PBOs include Nal’ibali, FunDza, Funda Wande and SmartStart.

The Department for Basic Education approved a list of 39 PBO websites on 8 May 2020, and until last week, only Telkom and other fixed-line operators had zero-rated PBO sites.

Vodacom has now started to comply, and as of Monday 14 July 2020, had zero-rated 19 of the PBO sites.

According to MTN, it had been instructed by the government to prioritise universities, TVET colleges and now schools – leaving the little prospect of zero-rating of PBOs for the foreseeable future, claims the trust.

The DG Murray Trust has offered to pay for the creation of a single portal through which all PBOs can be easily zero-rated by network operators, and which will provide a means of management and monitoring. This mechanism would take less than a few hours to integrate into network operator systems.

However, MTN has chosen to ignore this offer while arguing under-capacity at the same time.

In May 2020, over 100,000 South Africans signed DGMT’s petition requesting all mobile network operators to zero-rate the websites of PBOs as a matter of urgency. Find the petition here.

The Department of Basic Education has been listed as a second respondent. No relief is sought from it unless it turns out to be true that network operators have been instructed to prioritise the websites of schools over public benefit organisations, in which case DGMT will request an order to set aside that instruction.

The Department of Communication and Digital Technologies is listed as the third respondent because of its oversight role, but no relief is sought from it.