Walter Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal’s lead technology columnist, has penned an impassioned column for a standards-based mobile ecosystem that strips cellular carriers of the control they currently exert over handsets, software and everything else.
Suppose you own a Dell computer, and you decide to replace it with a Sony. You don’t have to get the permission of your Internet service provider to do so, or even tell the provider about it. You can just pack up the old machine and set up the new one.
Now, suppose your new computer came with a particular Web browser or online music service, but you’d prefer a different one. You can just download and install the new software, and uninstall the old one. You can sign up for a new music service and cancel the old one. And, once again, you don’t need to even notify your Internet provider, let alone seek its permission.
Oh, and the developers of such computers, software and services can offer you their products directly, without going through the Internet provider, without getting the provider’s approval, and without giving the provider a penny…
This is the way digital capitalism should work, and, in the case of the mass-market personal-computer industry, and the modern Internet, it has created one of the greatest technological revolutions in human history, as well as one of the greatest spurts of wealth creation and of consumer empowerment.
So, it’s intolerable that the same country that produced all this has trapped its citizens in a backward, stifling system when it comes to the next great technology platform, the cellphone.
Mossberg goes on to argue that regulators should force U.S. cellular companies to be much more like ISPs — dumb pipes that send information to and from customers without any say over products and programs.
The argument makes a lot of theoretical sense, but real-life experience raises some questions in my mind. Europe has a system that’s much closer to Mossberg’s dream than ours, yet there are a lot of reasons to think that U.S. consumers do far better under our system.
People here pay an average of 4 cents a minute for cellular calls. Customers in most European countries pay three to four times that and no one pays less than 11 cents a minute. What’s more, revenue per minute is plummeting here but holding steady across Europe. I haven’t seen good numbers for data, but I rarely saw people using their phones to surf the Internet during my recent trip to Paris.
I’m not saying that our system is certainly better. I’m just saying that I still have a lot of questions.
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