Brockmann and Company | Customer Insights

In part 1, we discussed the mobile walled garden and how it compares to the early 1990s and the Bulletin Board services.

The walled gardens of the CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL services all died away, because content providers found cheaper and more innovative ways to reach users. The service providers were all dis-intermediated and gradually made irrelevant as their value, the content, moved to the wide open Internet.

Things will unfold this time a little differently.

First of all, the mobile Internet doesn't have to be as dangerous as the Internet we all know and love. The Internet is dangerous today partly because it enables anonymous participation. Today, most users and participants are anonymous when they are connected at the network layer. Today, bad guys can ply their trade with significant impunity, more or less. Today, spammers can seize unwary anonymous computers and deliver email to unsuspecting users. Today, phishers can forge addresses and deliver messages designed as social engineering episodes to steal identities and personal integrity. With the use of IPv6, every user and device can be precisely defined, mobility and security are maintained since the network knows that you are the IPv6 address you were last time you were connected. With IPv6 the need for Network Address Translation is obsolete.

This is the problem that occurred with the analog wireless environment of the early 1990s. You may not remember, but in 1995, wireless toll fraud was  a $700 million problem for the wireless operators and their subscribers in America. Analog mobile users were capable of having their 'unique' mobile phone addresses stolen. Thieves would then place lengthy international long distance calls at users and if complained about, at mobile operator expense. Clearly, Google's openness approach needs to enable more than simply mobilizing the Internet, as we know it.

Enabling IPv6 in the mobile environment will quickly make IPv6 a requirement in the Internet too. That's because we expect that mobile operators will require IPv6 for content and service providers to be accessible in its mobile environment.

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