Over the last year, Meta Platforms has quietly inked partnerships with major telecommunication operators across the Global South. One key partner is MTN, a telecommunications giant often described as a kind of Verizon/T-Mobile for Africa, with more than 300 million mobile subscribers across 16 African and Middle Eastern markets. In Africa, MTN has rolled out Meta-optimized WhatsApp in 12 markets, starting with Nigeria, and has made network adjustments that help WhatsApp calls connect faster and drop less often. In Latin America, America Movil has gone live with similar Meta integrations across 15 countries.
On paper, the partnerships sound innocuous, even progressive. MTN and Meta promise up to a 50% improvement in key performance indicators for WhatsApp calls: a change that, for the average user, could mean faster call setup and fewer dropped WhatsApp calls. America Movil, meanwhile, touts a 15% reduction in Meta-related traffic, a technical way of saying that the same Meta data now moves through its mobile networks using less capacity, letting operators push more calls and apps through the same infrastructure, lowering the cost of carrying each WhatsApp call. These optimization partnerships, struck quietly over the last year on largely confidential commercial terms, are presented by operators as proof of improved user experience and reduced network strain, even as the exact financial arrangements remain opaque.
But efficiency, when selectively applied, is never neutral. It quietly redistributes power. MTN, after all, is not just another carrier: It is Africa’s continental kingmaker. And Meta’s messaging platforms, chief among them WhatsApp, are the default communications layer for more than 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 is part of a broader, global trend: app–network co-optimization. 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 telecommunications partners can reduce latency, lower data costs, and improve service quality.
For users, that means pages load faster, videos buffer less, and each data bundle stretches a bit further. These are legitimate goals. But beneath the rhetoric of optimization lies a structural shift: the extension of corporate control deep into the arteries of connectivity itself.
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 (OTT) messaging platforms such as WhatsApp cannibalize traditional calling, partnerships with the very disruptors that displaced them seem like salvation.
But 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%) 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% 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. That 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. When one app is tuned so precisely that its competitors feel sluggish or expensive by comparison, there is no need for coercion, the market simply tips.
Moreover, these optimization deals often involve subtle forms of data discrimination. To prioritize WhatsApp traffic, networks must identify it, inspecting, labeling, and sometimes routing 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 optimization layer also enriches Meta’s understanding of user behavior 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.
To be clear, the benefits are real. Users experience clearer calls, operators conserve bandwidth, and environmental efficiency improves. Optimization, in principle, is good engineering. But efficiency is not the same as fairness. When the optimization 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 privatized 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 optimization 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.
