Pattern Recognition
TOBY SHAPSHAK: End of an error
The best news in the ICT white paper is that the apartheid censor body will be disbanded, but don’t expect it to happen soon, writes Toby Shapshak.
The end of an era, headlines have proclaimed in the last week. It was seemingly in reference to the news that BlackBerry was no longer making its own handsets. Or was it a reference to the final days of the Rosetta spacecraft as it completed its 12-year mission to investigate a comet for clues to the origins of the universe? Maybe it was about the latest pronouncement from telecommunications & postal services minister Siyabonga Cwele about the long-awaited national integrated ICT policy white paper, published this week. This came days after Cwele successfully sued his own regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa), for trying to hold a wireless spectrum auction. Personally, I’m much more interested in the comet. We’ve been watching BlackBerry spiral through its death throes for years and this is the best move for the formerly dominant early smartphone maker, whose market value was once US$80bn. App makers have abandoned its otherwise excellent BlackBerry 10 op...
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