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Just about two weeks remain for public comment on the Electronic Communications and Transactions Bill, before our “second Constitution” goes beyond civic hands. While some organisations recognise its importance, and danger, the public remains strangely unexcited.

The Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Bill is in that pleasant limbo that transparent law-making demands; a public comment period during which everybody can psyche themselves up for the battle ahead.

I told you so

 

Less than a year from now we will all be puzzled at how provisions so obviously silly could have crept into the ECT Bill.

And battle it should be. For the IT community (including the two million-odd people on the Internet) and the broader formal business sector, there has never been a more important piece of legislation. The only document to compare it to is the Constitution, and one lawyer rightly refers to the Bill as our “second Constitution”.

Consider: it will change the way we do business, change the course of some veritable rivers of money, change the way much of the rest of the world interacts with us and determine the future of much of our technological, and by extension economic, development. It is to be a foundation law, on which many future laws and regulations will be based, so it is intended to be, and damn well better be, just about unassailable.

This is pretty significant stuff, in other words.

Yet South Africans are again showing off their remarkable talent for apathy. We saw it when the old Internet guard tried to prevent government encroaching on its territory, we saw it when Telkom increased its rates ridiculously, and we are seeing it again.

The people affected by these issues are not dim and they cannot be uninformed unless they want to be. The only remotely plausible explanation is that South Africans, unlike the rest of humanity, have no sense of self-interest. They are happy to have the world they live in redefined by decree, for better or for worse, without trying to exert any influence.

Not that the reason matters nearly as much as the consequences. This time it is not a drill, and unless Joe Public educates himself on the matter and makes his voice heard rather snappily, he will spend the next decade or so suffering for it.

Behind the scenes

This is not to say that there is not some good work being done behind the scenes. As always that small core of people who make civil society tick are hard at it, doing their best to make the world a better place. In this case it means trying to stem the mad rush to get the Bill signed into law, as the IT Lawyers Forum intends to do, and mobilising the user public, as the Internet Society wants to do. A number of other organisations will play key roles in moderating the Bill, such as the Cape Telecommunications Users Forum and the Internet Service Providers Association. It hardly requires clairvoyance, however, to predict that none of these organisations will be able to claim much popular support for their points of view.

In my experience, politicians are swayed by only two things: money and votes. We have seen ample examples of what happens when big business sets the agenda; just think of our Telecommunications Act or the horror of recent American copyright law. Without real popular support, these civil and industry bodies do not stand a snowball's chance in hell against the moneymen. They can only bring logic to the table and, as another lawyer says, politicians have a Constitutional right to stupidity.

My prediction is that less than a year from now we will all be puzzled at how provisions so obviously silly could have crept into the ECT Bill. There will be long discussions on the utter lack of common sense it will display and calls will go out for the head of a scapegoat.

Not that such a prediction means much, but at least I'll be able to say, “I told you so”.