Will WhatsApp's rising costs expose South Africa’s digital dependency?

More than a decade later, the implications of that acquisition deserve renewed scrutiny.

Viewed individually, these amounts appear insignificant. At scale, they are anything but. At 62 cents, one million messages cost R620,000. Ten million cost R6.2 million.

The difficulty arises when a useful communications channel gradually becomes critical infrastructure.

Once an organisation has redesigned customer journeys, integrated contact centres, trained customers and constructed digital services around a privately controlled platform, switching becomes increasingly difficult and expensive.

This is a classic platform economy problem. Network effects create convenience, convenience creates adoption, adoption creates dependency, and dependency shifts bargaining power towards the platform owner.

The platform owner controls access conditions, technical standards, commercial terms and, ultimately, the rules governing participation in its ecosystem.

This is precisely the question at the centre of my research and my book, The Silicon Empire vs Social Impact: The David & Goliath Battle, which examines the GovChat experience and the broader tension between public interest innovation and privately controlled digital infrastructure.

GovChat demonstrated the extraordinary possibilities of using widely adopted digital platforms to deliver public services at scale. It also demonstrated the structural vulnerability that arises when public interest technology becomes dependent on infrastructure over which neither the innovator nor the state has ultimate control.

This raises a fundamental question for governments and corporate boards: who controls your digital infrastructure when your organisation does not own the platform on which it operates?

Digital sovereignty is sometimes misunderstood as an argument for technological isolationism. It is not.

South Africa cannot and should not disconnect itself from global technology platforms. The question is whether participation becomes dependency.

Digital sovereignty is about maintaining sufficient control, choice and strategic autonomy over the infrastructure, data and technologies upon which increasingly digital societies depend.

Organisations should be able to determine which channel is most appropriate according to cost, customer preference, language, accessibility, security and the nature of the transaction.

This also represents an important opportunity for African telecommunications operators, such as MTN, and African technology companies more broadly, to combine existing infrastructure with AI, multilingual communication and intelligent orchestration to create locally controlled alternatives.