Napoleon Adok Gai, the Director General of the National Communication Authority - Credit: Ministry of ICT and Postal Services

The head of National Communication Authority (NCA) stated that for local content in South Sudan to be monetized, there must be agreed community standards with online platforms.

NCA Director General Napoleon Adok mentioned that South Sudan does not currently have a Community Standards agreement with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Twitter [X], which is essential for protecting the property of content creators.

Adok emphasized that the monetization of local content in South Sudan hinges on the country reaching agreements on community standards, data regulations, and intellectual property protection laws. These steps are crucial to safeguarding the rights of content creators and fostering a conducive environment for monetizing local content, he said.

“The content providers networks are the ones of Google, Meta, Twitter, and TikTok these are content provider networks, and they are networks of their own,” said Adok.

The NCA boss made these remarks during the 4th Edition of the Connecting South Sudan event held in Juba on Friday, March 15, 2024.

“Those networks before they can monetize material generated from anywhere, first they have to agree with those people in that country for a community standard,” he said.

“It is important to have an agreed community standard, community standard is beneficial for you the content creator it protects your intellectual property for example if you produce a video that your video is not plagiarized these are things that are adopted in the community standard of a country”.

Adok further stressed that content providers network is also holding back because the country does not have data protection and Intellectual Property law.

“They [content provider networks] would like to see a country has data protection and Intellectual Property law,” Adok said.

“When content network providers come here, they want to see what those laws are, do they have data protection laws and what is the scope of it,” he said.

“Our country still does not have data protection law, that is one disadvantage to why these giant technologies are holding back, and additional to that, we do not have Intellectual Property law and the last one is Cypher Security law.”