The Rise of App-Network Co-Optimisation
Over the past year, Meta has quietly formed partnerships with major telecommunications operators across the Global South. One of its key partners is MTN, a telecommunications giant often likened to Verizon or T-Mobile in Africa, with over 300 million mobile subscribers spread across 16 African and Middle Eastern markets. In Africa, MTN has rolled out Meta-optimised WhatsApp in 12 markets, starting with Nigeria, and has made network adjustments that help WhatsApp calls connect faster and drop less often. Similarly, in Latin America, America Movil has implemented similar Meta integrations across 15 countries.
On the surface, these partnerships seem benign, even progressive. MTN and Meta claim up to a 50 per cent improvement in key performance indicators for WhatsApp calls, which could mean faster call setup and fewer dropped calls for users. Meanwhile, America Movil highlights a 15 per cent reduction in Meta-related traffic, which translates to less network capacity being used for the same data, allowing operators to handle more calls and apps through the same infrastructure while lowering costs. These optimisation partnerships, however, have been struck on largely confidential commercial terms, leaving the exact financial arrangements unclear.
But efficiency, when selectively applied, is never neutral. It quietly redistributes power. MTN is not just another carrier—it is Africa’s continental kingmaker. And Meta’s messaging platforms, particularly WhatsApp, are the default communications layer for over three billion people worldwide. When the most widely used app for calls and messages gains privileged integration with one of the most powerful platforms-cum-carriers in emerging markets, the result is market-tipping by design.
This trend is part of a broader global shift: app–network co-optimisation. Technology giants are no longer simply building apps that run on the Internet—they are fine-tuning the Internet itself around their apps. By aligning infrastructure, code, and traffic management protocols, Meta and its telecom partners can reduce latency, lower data costs, and improve service quality.
For users, this means pages load faster, videos buffer less, and each data bundle stretches further. These are legitimate goals. But beneath the rhetoric of optimisation lies a structural shift: the extension of corporate control deep into the arteries of connectivity itself.
Case Studies: Nigeria and South Africa
Nigeria’s early rollout offers a glimpse of how this works. MTN reports fewer dropped WhatsApp calls, clearer connections, and faster setup times. Similar gains are being recorded across Mexico and Central America. For telcos struggling with declining voice revenues, as over-the-top messaging platforms such as WhatsApp cannibalise traditional calling, partnerships with the very disruptors that displaced them seem like salvation.
However, for competitors, regulators, and civil society, the implications are far more complex. In markets where consumers rely overwhelmingly on a single app for communication, even a small quality differential (5 or 10 per cent) can determine which platform “wins.” In South Africa, for example, traditional voice revenues have fallen sharply as users migrate to OTT calls, which can be more than 95 per cent cheaper. A partnership that ensures WhatsApp performs faster and more reliably than Signal or Telegram effectively locks users into WhatsApp and locks South African telcos out of fair competition, not by price or policy, but by design.
This is the quiet face of monopoly: not outright exclusion, but quality foreclosure that gradually squeezes out every alternative. South Africa has seen this pattern before. Long before the MTN-Meta deal, Mxit, once boasting more than 50 million active users, lost its footing and ultimately shut down after WhatsApp arrived, largely because WhatsApp offered cheap messaging that local competitors like Mxit could not match. If a global platform can topple a homegrown giant without any special network optimisation, then a partnership that fine-tunes the network even further around WhatsApp only amplifies that dominance.
Implications for Net Neutrality and Competition
These optimisation deals often involve subtle forms of data discrimination. To prioritise WhatsApp traffic, networks must identify it, inspect it, label it, and sometimes route it differently from other Internet traffic. This creates a form of app-specific fast-laning, eroding the principle of net neutrality. And if the deal involves zero-rating, where a user’s data for WhatsApp is free or discounted, the price signal tilts further, nudging users toward Meta’s ecosystem.
Each optimisation layer also enriches Meta’s understanding of user behaviour and network conditions. The company learns not only what people say, but how, when, and where they connect—information it uses to make WhatsApp feel unusually fast, reliable, and data-efficient for everyday users. Over time, this feedback loop cements Meta’s advantage, making it ever harder for local or foreign competitors to match the same performance, reach, or insight long-term.
Balancing Efficiency and Fairness
To be clear, the benefits are real. Users experience clearer calls, operators conserve bandwidth, and environmental efficiency improves. Optimisation, in principle, is good engineering. But efficiency is not the same as fairness.
When the optimisation is exclusive, when only Meta’s services are tuned for maximum performance, it becomes a form of digital enclosure, a “closed corridor” masquerading as open innovation. If these collaborations are truly open and app-agnostic, then Meta and MTN should prove it. They should publish their integration playbooks, disclose the APIs and technical standards used, and commit to fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory access for any qualified app developer.
Regulators, for their part, should demand public reporting, independent audits, and app-neutral traffic policies to ensure that public infrastructure is not privatised by stealth.
The Internet’s early promise was openness, an architecture that allowed anyone, anywhere, to build and connect without permission. That openness built the very ecosystems Meta now dominates. But if optimisation becomes exclusion, if performance is reserved for partners, then the digital commons risks becoming a private corridor.
Efficiency should serve all, not sanctify one platform. Otherwise, better calls today may quietly become digital gatekeeping tomorrow. And that, in the long run, is a far greater cost than any dropped connection.
