Over on another blog where I work, The Mobile Cocktail, my CTIA coverage is featuring a tongue-in-cheek look at the ROKR, Motorola's iTunes compatible phone.
Several journalists (yours truly included) have had fun with Motorola's proposed name, printing pictures of NBC weatherman and FoodTv producer-host Al Roker alongside our stories.
Look, there he is on the cover of People. ROKR-Roker, get it? Since much of Roker the host has in fact disappeared recently, thanks to surgery that made his stomach the size of a chicken egg, the irony is even richer. There are laughs a-plenty. Tears are literally rolling down some journalists' faces. (Not.)
Anyway, the real story here is much more important and much, much nastier.
There is a move afoot among the world's mobile (or cellular) carriers to keep absolute control over all the money to be made with cellular (or mobile) broadband. It's not just the users they seek to control, and not just the phones.
If you download a bit, even megabits, the mobile (cellular) carriers figure they should look at what you're accessing, decide whether you should get it at all, and take a cut of the revenue as well. (A pre-operation Roker-sized cut.)
This is not Internet service they're offering. These are private networks.
The question is whether consumers will buy into it. They've certainly been sheep in the past, paying $3 for snippets of songs called ringtones they can upload themselves free on dozens of Web sites.
Last year, the entertainment industries were trying to take advantage of this phenomenon. This year it's the carriers.
In their defense, cellular spectrum costs money. And it costs more money to build an effective mobile infrastructure.
How much money? Thanks to the way governments work in this area, it's a bit like the salaries of NCAA football and basketball coaches. As more money comes in, salaries rise (spectrum costs rise) so the profit margin remains essentially flat.
In other words if carriers succeed in this plant the big beneficiaries will be governments that license spectrum, and the idea of spectrum as a government-controlled good.
This will be very, very bad for things like 802.11, which depend on growing access to unlicensed spectrum. It will also be bad for economic growth, because those who "own" spectrum tend to hoard it (as we've seen with broadcasters.) If you were here yesterday, you heard the argument.
A short-term recession in the mobile industry might not be a very bad thing.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Mike Teevan on April 3, 2005 09:11 PM writes...
Surely the point of the motorola/apple get together was to allow existing apple customers to play music from their existing itunes library on their phone, no ?
Or is it to allow apple to have a bite of phone revenues ? maybe.
I want the ROKR, or whatever it's called when it comes out, but I want it to carry music I already own for my iPod.
I will not use my phone to access the painfully slow 3g networks for an impulse buy.
Anyway, if i do buy from the music store with the phone, can I then copy it in the itunes library from the handset.
My iPod reflects what's on my PC. Will the phone not do the same.
The details have yet to be released, but it seems the phone companies may have missed the point on this one.
Permalink to Comment2. Jesse Kopelman on April 4, 2005 03:01 PM writes...
Mike, when you say phone companies are you talking about companies that make phones or are you talking about service providers? The service providers want you to buy music from them or at least over their network, not play stuff you already have saved to a phone HD. The phone manufactures, while they want you to buy their phones, have a very incestuous relationship with the service providers (not only are the service providers their largest handset customers, but most phone makers also make network equipment for the service providers that has a much better margin than the handset business). So, it is not like anyone missed the boat, it is more like they had an argument with their spouse and ended up never buying the tickets and the only one's feeling bad are their kids.
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