CA: Fair Competition and Equality of Treatment regulations to be applicable in 18 months

Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) Director-General Francis Wangusi (left) and the board chairman Ngene Gituku at a press briefing on the regulation of dominant companies in the ICT sector at CA Headquarters.

Communications Authority of Kenya has set a one-and-a-half year timeline to officially apply the Fair Competition and Equality of Treatment regulations 2015.

Currently the process of contracting a consultant at a Kshs 30 million fee is underway to enable the regulations to be delivered in a fair manner to consumers.

“Through the study, we will identify who has specific power in the market, after the study, the consultant will share his report with us then we will share it with stakeholders who will play a part in setting the final regulations,” said Mr Francis Wangusi, Director General, Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), during a press briefing held at CA Headquarters.

The Authority is currently conducting a related study in the Broadcasting Signal Distribution (BSD) market to determine cost based rates for provision of these services to broadcasters and other content developers.

Mr. Wangusi also said that the regulations were not specific to the telecommunication market only as it had been mis-reported in the media, but will address the ICT industry as a whole including the broadcasting and postal courier sectors.

He also pointed out that the regulator will first hire an international firm to analyse the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors. The study will identify which firm is dominant in which market segment in a market power report, and then find out which company is abusing its dominance.

So far, Wangusi said that there were no mechanisms which spell out what constitutes abuse of market dominance, saying that the report will help solve that problem.

A declaration of dominance, however, will not mean to punish any firm, but that dominant firms attract more scrutiny because any anti-competitive action could be harmful to the market as a whole.

Following the amendment of the Kenya Information and Communications Act in December 2013, the Authority embarked on the process of revising the ICT sector regulations in order to align them with the revised ICT sector legislation.

It is in regards to this that CA proposed ten laws which have been tabled in Parliament awaiting enactment. One of the laws is on fair competition and Equality of Treatment. However, the regulator is also working on additional three laws.

Under the proposed laws, firms face penalties that could run into billions of shillings if found guilty of abusing their dominant position. The firms also stand a penalty of 10 per cent on the gross turnover for anti-competitive conduct.