In the world since past, media power was vested in the ownership of the newspaper or radio. Owners and founders became important as gatekeepers. I can think of major captains in industry in this way. William Pike, at the head of the New Vision was one such personage as was Wafula Oguttu when I started out. Mandarins were also powerful in editors and some reporters. I worked with some who wielded actual influence over events.
Equally powerful were advertisers who paid the bills. In the marriage of MTN and Next Media other forms of power can be seen that reflect the new information age and its unique architecture. The cultural assets belong to Next Media. It is the entity that has content supremacy through journalists, presenters, production habits, audience memory, radio frequencies, sporting and entertainment relationships. The acquisition of Capital Radio and pairing of different radio and television brands with different audiences is something its technology partner MTN Uganda cannot do.
However, MTN does not need this capacity to exercise dominance over the relationship they are building. It commands the relationship with the subscriber on the network regardless. That means authenticating the user, determining and attractiveness the ease of streaming as an experience through preferential data pricing, and a payment system that sits beside it which is now used for many other services. One is likely to pay subscribe and watch because the ecosystem of digital payments and their culture (we pay for water, electricity etc. on the same packet) makes this germane.
In the first six months of 2026 MTN reported 2.6 billion mobile-money transactions worth UGX 113.3 trillion and about UGX 1.45 trillion in mobile-money trust balances that is UGX 113.3 trillion is transaction traffic, a circuitry that is how the economy works as I have written before in “The Algorithm and the citizen”. Bank of Uganda recognised this issue years ago when mobile money was still treated awkwardly as a service offered by companies whose primary licences came from UCC. I made a visit to the Bank around 2008 to speak about why National Payments system must respond to these new realities (big thanks to Joyce Okello).
But the bank is slow and current events will be chased when they have well bolted the barn.
A senior Bank official observed in 2021 that mobile money had grown to the point of becoming a source of systemic risk, one reason the National Payment Systems Act separated payments activity from ordinary telecommunications regulation. Well, a service does not have to be a monopoly to become systemic. It merely has to become difficult enough to lose. Once its failure can interrupt households, traders and other institutions far beyond the company’s own offices, the important question is what happens when it fails.
Observed through such regulatory rose lenses, there can be seen a parity in something like the MTN/TV arrangement between Next Media and the telecom when there is really none. Both MTN and Next media can find new partners if the relationship does not work but the stronger party in the relationship remains the one who is most difficult to replace. How quickly, for example, could Next Media reproduce the combination of MTN’s network reach, subscriber authentication, data pricing, promotion and MoMo integration elsewhere? Interdependence is not equal dependence.
In fact, while both UCC and Bank of Uganda oversee important licenses related to the capacity of technology provided by service companies like MTN to scale to utility level, they don’t combined account for all the nodes in a system which also includes companies which build networks, operating systems, app stores, cloud services and have international links. The reality we are witnessing over ecosystem regulation is that it is less an empire with a single emperor than a series of gates. Influence over the right gate may matter more than ownership of the whole territory.
Consider the good journalism argument which is traditionally paired with editorial independence.
The old way would be to say if I get the owner, I can ensure censorship and capture the newsroom. Angry advertisers and corrupt politicians know this very well. In the MTN/TV partnership we could have a perfect setting for an editorially free newsroom(s). Over time, the architecture will skew commercially if it is successful with projections suggesting an important share of the digital audience shall arrive through the distribution partner who also determines how promotional placement affects what is discovered, which content is cheaper or easier to watch because of commercial arrangements, herds payments through another company and the better information about the audience sits partly outside the newsroom.
Under these conditions an editor still chooses the story, but other entities may shape the conditions under which that story reaches which audience.
Digital gateways always present a challenge that a media company can remain legally independent but its audience, revenues, payments, data or visibility increasingly run through systems it does not control.
What happens when the ecosystem is in conflict with the newsroom? Indeed, what challenges are possible when the story that must be told concerns the telecom partner, payment partner, event sponsor, technology supplier or government client whose relationship is profitable somewhere else in the group? Also as mentioned in part one, Next Media, as something more than a media company would like to sell conversion. To prove conversion, it has to connect exposure with behaviour. More precisely exposure must be connected to purchase or action, the more valuable the system becomes.
Well, MTNTV sits in that rarefied and unusual place because the viewer can be authenticated by telephone number, watches through a network and can pay through a wallet. There is a real power here to mine data to reveal trends relevant to the commercial interest that sits outside Next Media. While it poses some regulatory problems regarding personal data (Uganda’s data protection rules already require higher-risk processing to be assessed and impose duties on data controllers) a seamless customer experience can hide a complicated chain of legal responsibility.
A menu of political programmes, churches, campaign material, sports, children’s content or financial advice can support all kinds of inferences, some harmless and some sensitive. Once viewing becomes attached to an authenticated device the old separation between an anonymous television audience and an identifiable customer narrow. It becomes a form of public power and for traditional media, already was.
Events like the selective switching off of certain public internet access or mobile services during high temperature political seasons sit on one ecosystem now. Within the same ecosystem are regular economic activities such as banking, transport, government services and so forth.
If communications, payments, identity, media and data have converged substantially, what does this mean for the actors outside the MTN/TV arrangement?
If a media company depends commercially on a network which itself operates under state licence, where does one form of pressure end and another begin?
Can an integrated platform, in theory, favor its own content through pricing or placement, making a competing service more difficult to use or move information generated in one business into another?
What shall regulators prioritize? Is this a media problem, a competition problem, consumer protection or data protection? All at once?
Where an ecosystem introduces less visible dependencies, how is regulation to respond to say, foreign influence, a subject of a major piece of legislation in Uganda? It seems that consequences (effects) are a more reliable way to think about both regulation and progress in this new technology and information age. A country that can coordinate a regulatory foresight (across several sectors) on effects that impact the whole ecosystem is better off than another where every regulator accounts for its own goals. The key question would be, what happens when the system fails or is challenged? How many people lose access to money, information or customers? Can businesses reasonably switch to another route? Does the service hold data capable of producing sensitive inferences? Can strength in one market change the terms of another?
Such is the new age.
