Columbia University law professor, Timothy Wu claims mobile-phone carriers’ iron-clad control of networks is retarding innovation and hurting consumers.
“The wireless industry, over the last decade, has succeeded in bringing wireless telephony at competitive prices to the American public. Yet at the same time, we also find the wireless carriers aggressively controlling product design and innovation in the equipment and application markets, to the detriment of consumers. In the wired world, their policies would, in some cases, be considered simply misguided, and in other cases be considered outrageous and perhaps illegal,” said Wu in his paper released by the New America Foundation (pdf).
According to On The Media this week, there are two hundred million cell phone subscribers in the United States. The wireless industry has grown up in the last decade, so it’s a good time to ask, how’s it doing?
Columbia law professor Tim Wu says, not so good (MP-3).
PROFESSOR WU: Bluetooth was promised to make it easy for phones to communicate with other things, computers, printers. It’s really hard, believe it or not, just to get your cell phone to talk to your computer, for something as simple as just backing up your address book, so if you lose your phone, you’ve got a backup.Under a lot of carriers’ constructions today, Bluetooth is almost completely crippled. You can’t send music back and forth. It’s very hard to send photos from your phone to your computer, all again, because there’s a fear of losing control and there’s a fear of crippling some potential business model that revolves around charging you to do something with your phone.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even if you’re not technically inclined, you can see the limitations of this lockdown. For instance, if you buy a phone that you really like and you change carriers, your phone is locked up. You have to buy a new phone. You can’t take it with you, and you wrote in your paper that it would be very easy to unlock these phones. They’re simply not permitted to.
And that leads to a question that I think a lot of consumers have had about Apple’s much bally-hooed iPhone. You can’t use it, unless you subscribe to Cingular, an AT&T service, right?
PROFESSOR WU: I think that’s right, and I think it was a surprise to a lot of people. You know, you think Apple had this great new product and, you know, it turns out it’s locked to Cingular’s network.
Now that may change. I’m hoping the consumer pressure will lead to a world where you see your phone as something that you own [LAUGHS], not the carrier. You own. I mean, you pay for it, and then you can bring it and say, listen, I’ve got this great phone, or this great device, and I want to use it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, back before the Carter phone decision, AT&T was saying if you don’t have a unified system, it just won’t work. And that system is AT&T.
Now the carriers are saying, you don’t need to be re-regulating us, you don’t need to be telling us what to do. There’s so much competition in the mobile phone market that this situation will correct itself. Well, isn’t there? And won’t it?
PROFESSOR WU: I think there’s always a role for consumer rights, no matter how competitive an industry is, and the truth is, it’s not a truly competitive industry in any case.
The spectrum that they depend upon is government property, which they lease. There’s really only four major players who have the tens of billions of dollars required to be in this market in the first place.
We’re not talking about the vodka market. We’re not talking about blue jeans. We’re talking about a government supervised spectrum-based oligopoly, which is doing things that are not good for consumers, and I think, you know, to say, well, we’ve got competition, forget about it, is just not an answer to the things we’ve identified in this study.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But you’ve also said that comprehensive legislation should only be used as a last resort, so what do you recommend in the short term?
PROFESSOR WU: The most important power is consumer pressure. The industry likes to say everything is competitive, everything’s fine. You know, they love to keep things as they are. They like the current model.
The only thing that pushes them, besides government, is consumer knowledge, consumer pressure, and if people get more and want more out of their cell phones, they will eventually get more. That’s the most powerful force out here, is the force of the educated consumer.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web told U.S. House members last week that protecting Net Neutrality should be one of their top priorities.
His prescription for the Web’s continued success includes the preservation of Net Neutrality and the thwarting of new royalty systems that would “constrain what people can read or publish online.” “The Web took off in all its glory because it was a royalty-free infrastructure,” Sir Tim said, reiterating his earlier warnings against threats by phone and cable companies to impose new tolls on Web traffic.
Rep. Greg Walden (R-Oregon) asked Berners-Lee to prioritize the one or two policy priorities that Congress should solve in the short term.
DailyWireless has more on Wireless Net Neutrality.
