R180-million “consent settlement” with MultiChoice outrageous:
28 May 2017
The R180-million “consent settlement” filed on Thursday with the Competition Tribunal by South Africa’s pay-TV monopoly MultiChoice for price fixing and fixing trade conditions is outrageous. The agreement hints at the dangerous extent of systemic corporate state capture hardwired in a number of our state institutions, legislative and regulatory frameworks.
The amount is too small to warrant being described as a pinprick. It is nothing close to a slap on the wrist. If our economy is to transform, grow and prosper, the solution is not pinpricks. It is to legislatively enforce a breakup of the monopolies such as MultiChoice that more than 20 years after our April 1994 historic democratic breakthrough continue to dominate our economy.
MultiChoice is a subsidiary of Naspers, a private monopoly created during the colonial era and served as the mouthpiece of the Broederbond, the ideological vanguard of apartheid but refused to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for its complicity in the crime against humanity. Its monopoly practices, including its bloodsucking deal with the SABC, its opposition to encryption in South Africa’s analogue digital television broadcasting migration policy, coalesce on strengthening its dominance and weakening free-to-air television broadcasting, and have gone too far.
The R180-million “consent settlement” with MultiChoice can best be described as a token punishment after the Competition Commission, the investigative arm allowed the monopoly to be involved in determining the extent and form of the amount. MultiChoice’s advertising income is nearly R17-billion a year, and accounts for just under half of MultiChoice’s staggering annual turnover of R35-billion. The R180-million represents just 0.5 percent of MultiChoice’s annual income. MultiChoice is big enough to force its will on the industry and, as the Competition Commission itself found, the monopoly did so through its advertising sales company, DStv Media Sales.