Web standards body joins plea for open mobile Internet

BOSTON--A number of Internet companies have been banging away at the wireless industry lately, pleading with it to open its mobile networks and handsets to the larger world of the Internet. At Mobile Internet World, the granddaddy of the Internet, the World Wide Web Consortium, added its voice, but W3C’s director Tim Berners-Lee didn’t just single out the operators. He told handset makers, software developers and content providers they had just as much responsibility to maintain Internet openness on the mobile phone.

Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the Internet, drew parallels between the Web and the mobile Web, saying the same conditions that fostered the enormous growth and success on the Internet need to be applied to its mobile cousin. And that means not just open networks, where any content provider can reach customers, but the same open royalty-free framework behind the World Wide Web has to be extended to its mobile counterpart.

“It’s very important that the mobile Internet platform use the same standards as the regular Internet. It seems obvious, but we’ve already had several false starts,” Berners-Lee said. “We’ve seen if you wreck the wall around the garden, the flowers bloom outside of the garden.”

There is always an urge to go with proprietary solutions because operators can make money off of those solutions, but those platforms limit the creativity of millions of developers out there who are contemplating applications that we can’t even imagine today, Berners-Lee said. Even if operators open their networks to all comers, but there are still proprietary platforms supporting those applications, the industry would still be stifling that creativity through the fragmentation that would follow.

Berners-Lee pointed toward the infant World Wide Web’s chief rival in the early 90s, Gopher. As soon as the University of Minnesota, which developed the platform, began charging licensing fees, it failed. Betting on a standard may be risky, Berners-Lee said, because the standard could fail. But if you bet on a standard that doesn’t pan out, you haven’t lost too much, he added. If you bet on a proprietary solution, and the standard takes off, you stand to lose big, he said.

“We have a choice,” Berners-Lee concluded, evoking Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland. “You take the blue pill and you wake up, and you can believe whatever you want. Or you take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I’ll show you just how deep that rabbit hole goes.”