Yesterday Verizon Wireless introduced what it called Mobile Web 2.0.. It was a true triple play - it's not mobile, it's not the Web, it's not even new. (To top it all off, it only works on two camera phones, including the LG VX7000 pictured, from Engadget.com.)

Verizon insists on running its data efforts as a walled garden, with all applications written in Qualcomm's Brew, and with Verizon controlling the store. The new "service" locks Verizon down as the home page, and was actually produced by Infospace and Vindigo. Only a few phones can access it, and they're charging $5/month, plus airtime.

It's all nonsense, as Mike Masnick of TheFeature notes. The Web is based on open standards, and these are all closed. We have such standards, like Java and XHTML MP. All they've really done is to take some basic Web concepts, like "clickable headlines," and put them into a proprietary interface, through other people. There's no investment, and no benefit.

This is precisely what America Online did "back in the day," and we know what finally happened. Having one person, even a smart person, in control is always going to fail, once users can choose the whole world instead. AOL was able to roll along for years, throughout the Internet boom, despite its closed system, and finally sold out for more than half of the Time Warner empire.

But we know that game. Verizon won't do that well. As soon as the true Mobile Internet comes along, through Cingular and T-Mobile and Nextel, perhaps as soon as next year, and as soon as the mainstream media starts talking about the difference between an AOL approach and the Web itself, Verizon will start paying a rising penalty for its arrogance, in market share, even as the cost of its switching to a truly open platform rises exponentially.

Verizon thinks it can force people to do what it wants, that the only real question is how much capacity a mobile network has . That's like thinking your Internet profits are bounded by your backhaul capacity, and you don't even have to follow standards.

It's arrogant and Clueless. It's short-term thinking at its worst.