Walt Mossberg wants the US Government to sort out mobile industry

Mike Masnick over at Techdirt posted this yesterday. He’s commenting on Walt Mossberg, the noted Wall Street Journal tech columnist, who’s pushing for US Government intervention in the mobile phone marketplace.

It’s an interesting — and rather contentious perspective:

Link: Techdirt: Walt Mossberg Pushing For Gov’t Intervention In The Mobile Phone Market

Walt Mossberg has been talking about this for a while, but his latest column follows a few other recent calls for the government to step in and mandate more open wireless networks. The idea is that mobile networks should be more like the wider internet. That is, when you buy a computer, you don’t buy one locked to a particular ISP, or with only what that ISP wants you to access included. That openness has resulted in tremendous innovation in the PC, internet and software worlds — and it’s quite likely that a similar openness would lead to much more innovation in the mobile space as well.

Walt’s right — the interoperabilty, the compatibility, the openness is definitely what heavily contributed to the success of computer industry. (Apart from Apple….. or… well, even Apple standardised on the likes of USB, Firewire and so on).
Mike adds:

The problem, though, is that it’s really not that simple.

And he’s right. It’s not as simple as calling for openness. There’s so much going on across the marketplace and the dynamics are, at best, difficult to pinpoint exactly.

Do you subsidise every handset? Yes or no. Do you lock the handset to the network? How do you handle the mobile phone look-up if you’re using T-Mobile one day and chatting away on Vodafone the next?