The Competition Tribunal, the body which has the final say on antitrust-related matters in SA, has ordered WhatsApp and Facebook not to remove GovChat from the WhatsApp platform.
Earlier this month, GovChat — government’s digital communication platform — asked the tribunal to have Facebook interdicted from removing it from the WhatsApp platform that charges a fee to business and government clients for contacting customers or citizens.
On Friday, the Tribunal issued an order that regulates the arrangements between GovChat, WhatsApp and Facebook until a final judgment is made. The tribunal said it issued the order “because the parties were unable to agree on arrangements among themselves during this interim period”.
Apart from stopping Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, from kicking GovChat off the platform, the tribunal order provides that the two social media companies not do anything to undermine GovChat’s relationship with its clients. At the same time, GovChat may not add any new clients or users to its WhatsApp Business Account. GovChat will also not be able to expand its service offering to its existing clients.
The case casts a shadow on Facebook’s dominance in instant messaging amid sharper scrutiny of the industry’s power over public conversation. Recently, major players such as Facebook and Twitter banned former US president Donald Trump from their platforms, a move that has some questioning the equality of liberal vs conservative voices online.
At the heart of the dispute in SA is Facebook’s allegations that GovChat, which was launched in 2018 by listed technology group Capital Appreciation (Capprec) and the department of co-operative governance and traditional affairs, is in violation of its contract terms of use because when it signed up its digital communication programme to the WhatsApp Business app it pledged to use the service to monitor and evaluate service delivery, response time, failures, success and corruption in real time.
However, after the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, the government used GovChat to convey awareness messages, symptom-tracking notifications and provision of test results.
At a hearing before the tribunal last week, GovChat said Facebook moved to block GovChat on WhatsApp because the social media giant probably sees the government messaging service as a threat. Facebook could be eyeing an opportunity to provide similar services to the government directly.
GovChat is an affiliate of Capprec, funded through its Enterprise Development Fund. Capprec’s subsidiary Synthesis Software Technologies is involved in the design and development of the GovChat platform.
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