Are Carriers barriers to Advancements?

Nobody wants to lose power. Especially the carriers. At-least that is what Tim Wu, a professor at Columbus University thinks. In his interview with Brooke Gladstone (co-host of NPR’s On The Media radio show), Tim says that lot of things that can be done on a mobile phone are being stifled by the carriers for their own selfish reasons.

For example, something as trivial as maintaining call timer records on the phone are being squashed by these carriers. It is ironic that even as we keep talking more and more about intelligence on the phone ( or end devices for that matter) and building applications to do the same, on the other side efforts are made to stifle these.

I don’t buy into Chris Guttman McCabe’s ( an industry observer) argument that customers if they are forceful get what they want. That is not true. If that was the case, they would not have phones that are locked to a service provider. I can’t think of a single person who thinks that is a great idea, yet it is still in play.

I would accept Chris’ contention in a market like India. Here we can change service providers without any fears of contracts or penalties. In this kind of an environment, the customer drives the service provider, not in the US market ( atleast not now).