Parliament Advances Bill to Meter and Track Your Internet Usage

Internet providers and human rights groups do not usually worry about the same things. One builds networks and sells connections. The other spends its time questioning what governments and corporations do with the infrastructure already in place. Kenya's proposed internet metering law has pushed both toward the same conclusion: something is wrong with this system.

The Kenya Information and Communications (Amendment) Bill, 2025 is supposed to be a consumer protection law. Its sponsor, Aldai MP Marianne Kitany, says the idea is to stop internet providers from exploiting customers by making billing more transparent and tying what people pay to what they actually consume. To do that, the bill would require internet service providers to give every customer a unique and identifiable meter number, monitor their usage, convert that usage into readable details and generate invoices based on consumption. At least once every financial year, providers would also have to submit information about the billing system, including the meter numbers issued to subscribers, to the Communications Authority.

Two questions sit underneath the whole debate. Why build this system at all? And once it exists, what happens next? Industry is asking the first. Rights groups are asking the second. Both are looking at the same machine.

The bill promises consumer protection

Kitany's argument is not particularly difficult to understand. When you buy internet, you are buying a service. The bill's memorandum says the current proposal is meant to protect the economic interests of internet users and mitigate exploitation under Article 46 of the Constitution. Kitany has previously argued that the problem is familiar to anyone who has bought a data bundle that expires before they finish using it. In her telling, a system that can track what a customer has consumed could make it easier to account for what remains and stop providers from selling services that consumers do not fully use. There is a logic there.

But the legislation Parliament is considering goes further than simply requiring providers to show customers how much data they have used. It requires a new billing architecture. Every customer gets an identifiable number. Usage is monitored. Bills are generated from consumption. Information about the system, including those meter numbers, goes to the regulator. That is where the strange alliance begins.

The metering model doesn't match how the internet works

Internet providers are not making a civil liberties argument. Their objection is more basic: fixed internet doesn't work the way the bill assumes it does.

Internet infrastructure is capacity-based. It isn't consumed and depleted the way electricity or water is, and that distinction matters. Liquid Intelligent Technologies made exactly this point to Parliament last week.

When a household pays for a 20Mbps or 50Mbps fibre connection, it is generally paying for access to a certain level of capacity. The family can watch Netflix, download updates, attend meetings and connect ten devices without the internet itself becoming physically depleted. The network still has costs. Someone still has to build it, maintain it and expand its capacity. But those costs are not necessarily driven by every additional megabyte a customer downloads. That is why providers have spent years selling fixed broadband differently from mobile data. Kenyan households generally choose a speed tier and pay a predictable monthly fee.

Jamii Telecommunications, which operates Faiba, raised a related point with Parliament: invoicing per unit of consumption prices the service using an input that no longer drives its underlying cost. Complying with the law would also mean heavy investment in new network management and billing systems, the company says. Industry submissions more broadly have raised the possibility of deeper traffic-monitoring infrastructure, including Deep Packet Inspection, adding another layer of cost and complexity. None of that disappears. It ends up on someone's internet bill.

So the industry's argument is not simply that companies dislike regulation. It is that the regulation may be trying to fix the internet using the logic of a utility meter. Rights groups start from a different place entirely.

Surveillance

The proposal is potential surveillance infrastructure disguised as billing reform, according to the International Commission of Jurists. Amnesty International Kenya has raised the same concern. It picks up exactly where industry's argument leaves off.

Suppose the system works exactly as intended. Every subscriber now has a unique and identifiable meter number. Their provider monitors their usage to generate consumption-based billing. Information about the billing system and the numbers issued to subscribers is reported to the Communications Authority. What data is collected to make that system work? How much of it is linked to an identifiable person? Who gets access to it? How long is it kept? And what stops a system built for billing from being used for something else later?

The bill itself does not say that the government will inspect every website a Kenyan visits. That claim would go beyond the text. But the rights argument does not depend on pretending that it does. The concern is about the infrastructure being created and the safeguards around it. Once an identifiable system for monitoring and recording individual internet consumption exists, the question is no longer just whether Parliament intended to build a surveillance tool. It is whether Parliament has built an architecture that could be expanded, repurposed or accessed in ways the original memorandum never anticipated. That distinction matters. It is also why simply saying, "This is only about billing," has not settled the argument.

The suspicion around the bill did not emerge from nowhere. Kenya's recent history has made questions about communications infrastructure and state access to data particularly sensitive. Digital rights groups have spent years raising concerns about surveillance, internet disruptions and the relationship between telecommunications companies and security agencies. Amnesty International has also documented broader concerns about technology-facilitated surveillance and its effect on privacy, expression and assembly.

So when a bill asks providers to build a more detailed system around identifiable internet use, critics are not approaching it as a blank sheet of paper. They are asking what happens when the same state that says it needs information for one purpose decides it needs it for another. The government does not have to be secretly planning that outcome for the question to be legitimate. Systems outlive their original justifications. That is precisely why the justification matters.

The people most likely to feel the cost may be heavy users

There is another practical question worth asking. A consumption-based model would not affect every internet user in the same way. People who use relatively little data may barely notice. But households with multiple devices, remote workers, creators, students and other heavy users could face a very different proposition if fixed broadband begins to resemble metered utility service.

Satellite internet complicates the picture further. Providers such as Starlink operate with different infrastructure and cost structures from fibre networks, raising their own questions about how a consumption-based regime would apply across fundamentally different technologies. That does not make metering inherently wrong. It does mean Parliament needs to be clear about what behaviour it wants to change, and why metering is the right tool for it.

So what problem is this actually solving?

This may be the most important question in the entire debate. The bill says it is protecting consumers from exploitation. But what specific exploitation? Are Kenyans broadly being overcharged because fixed internet providers do not meter consumption? Are customers demanding to abandon unlimited and speed-based packages in favour of consumption-based billing?

If the problem is that customers cannot tell what they are paying for, could providers simply be required to provide clearer invoices and usage information without forcing every customer into a new billing architecture? If the problem is unused data expiring, why does that require an identifiable meter number and annual reporting to the regulator? And if the Communications Authority needs information to check whether providers are complying, why is the information required at the subscriber level rather than in an aggregated form?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions the bill still needs to answer.

The result is unusual. The system may be technically misguided and needlessly expensive. It may also hand the state more power over identifiable internet use than the bill's stated purpose requires. Neither point alone settles whether the bill should pass. But together they are hard to dismiss as activists being alarmist or companies protecting their margins, because the same instruction is arriving from two different directions: explain why this particular machine needs to exist before Parliament builds it.

That is the question at the centre of the internet metering bill. Not whether Kenyans deserve fairer billing. They do. The question is why fairer billing requires this.