The Promises and Perils Of The Mobile World

[Commentary] The mobile world holds a lot of promise for consumers, and for those brave enough to develop applications that have to work on a whole host of different devices and on the technologies of different carriers. Mobile is a marketing platform. It's an entertainment platform. It's a shopping platform, an organizing platform, a donation platform. It's anything anyone can imagine.

But as a panel of entrepreneurs brought together by the Mobile Internet Content Coalition (MICC) demonstrated June 11, the mobile world can be fraught with peril for those who risk angering the fickle powers that be who run their world. It's time for the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and even the Antitrust Division at the Justice Department to break open this closed little society. The FCC can grant the Public Knowledge petition to protect text messaging and short codes as common carrier services. The FTC or the DoJ could look at the cartelized pricing mechanisms and approvals. No one has to go through the same hazing maze or endure the same hazards to get a Web domain for the wired world. There is competition for domain registration in the wired world. What happens there should also happen in the wireless world.