mo Google

Google has certainly been disrupting the mobile telecom industry with its announced intention to buy mobile phone spectrum and recent deals with social networks and mobile telecom service providers. Setting aside the FCC auction framework recommended by Google, the real issue is the fostering of open or closed systems -- incumbents versus new players in the telecom space and a relatively new interpretation of the concept of the public commons.

Traditionally, the public commons was land held for the public good. In 18th century US, livestock grazed in the commons. In the 19th and 20th century, people frolicked in commons held parks. In the late 20th and current century, citizens could frolic and make their livelihoods in the electronic commons known as the Internet.

There has been continuing public discourse about an electronic public commons. As commercial interests have increasingly engaged in internet commerce, the notion of a public electronic commons has become a battleground...the recent net neutrality skirmish, is but one example of the thorny question of who actually operates/builds the internet. Until the late 1990's, before the commercialization of the web, the internet was an electronic commons used to transport files from one institution to another. Today we're all very aware of how much the internet has become part and parcel of daily life.

Auction of the spectrum currently occupied by traditional UHF television is up for grabs. Google has advocated the open access solution which foresees an electronic commons (open access and open web protocols) for part of the spectrum. The telecom industry, more specifically the wireless telecom industry, wants to control access and communication protocols. Whether or not Google buys any of the spectrum that will be up for auction, Google has come up with a plan for a transformational offering that will totally upend the current way of doing business in the wireless world. Hang on to your hats!

Oh BTW don't count Apple out of the equation either.