Mobile search next threat to net neutrality?

Stephen Withers
Monday, 05 February 2007 10:48

Your IT - Home IT

Reports from Europe that a consortium of mobile phone operators is considering the co-operative development of a search engine could be another threat to the concept of net neutrality.

If the reports - which were apparently started by
Britain's Sunday Telegraph - are correct, the carriers could easily make the new search engine more easily accessible from the handsets they provide than services from established players such as Google. Furthermore, they could easily throttle the performance of external search engines relative to their own.

Carriers are said to be concerned about revenues falling as calls become cheaper, and they want to grab what they see as their share of search-related advertising revenues. As far as I can see, mobile operators - at least those in Australia - already charge so much for data traffic that it is unlikely to become a majority activity any time soon. For example, Vodafone charges $1 per five minutes. I'm using Vodafone just as an example, so these comments shouldn't be seen as a specific attack on the company.

My prediction is that the carriers' search engine will appear within Vodafone Live, which means there will be no time or volume related charge (as there is with external searches), just a flat fee which is subsidised through advertising. Providing that fee is less than the minimum block of data use and that the carriers' search engine works well, third-party search facilities could be quickly squeezed out.

Another issue is the relatively expensive handsets required for mobile web access, although this is likely to be overcome very soon as LG has reportedly won a competition run by 12 leading carriers with a combined subscriber base of over 620 million to produce an affordable web-enabled handset.

Am I just being cynical by predicting that this phone will lack desirable features such as the ability to transfer files to and from a PC via Bluetooth (these guys want you to buy your games, music and ringtones exclusively over the air) or to act as a 'modem' for PC data traffic (they'd rather sell you a separate 'data card' along with a separate phone account and the accompanying monthly charge)?