Rabat – Azeddine El Mountassir Billah, director of the Moroccan National Telecommunications Regulatory Agency (ANRT) was sacked on Tuesday.
According to French-language news website Medias24, El Mountassir Bilah’s dismissal came about without prior notice, adding to the recent the mystery around ANRT.
The agency lifted its ban on free IP-based calling services on Monday without any official statement, which drew harsh criticism from Moroccan social users.
The agency’s decision to reverse its ban came after a report conducted by American Center for Technological Innovation at the Brookings Institution showed that the Moroccan economy lost $320 million as a result of the decision to stop the use of VoIP services. .
Amine Raghib, founder of Th3professional blog, who had previously led a social media campaign against Moroccan telecom providers following the ban last January, said that the ban was reversed temporarily in preparation of the of United Nations climate conference COP22, which will take place in Morocco on November 7-18.
As different hypotheses have floated to the surface as to the reasons of this dismissal, some have linked it to the VoIP ban reversal.
