The most interesting web / mobile news of the week, as co-editor David has blogged below, is Facebook partnering with telecom companies around the world (including du in the UAE) to offer a mobile version of their site that is free to access over 3G internet connections.
For details on the deal, read the post below. In short, if you are a du customer, you can now load up 0.facebook.com, a lite version of the site, with no data charges.
This in itself is not massive news, but it does hint at what will become a major force on the internet in the future - the emergence of the mobile internet as a "smart pipe" that does more than just give you web access. I've written about the smart pipe before, and smarter people than me frequently describe it as the future of telecoms.
Lets start with a few assumptions. 1) The proportion of web use that
happens over mobile networks will consistently rise through the coming
decade. 2) A lot more things will become connected to the mobile
internet (cars, iPads, billboards etc). 3)The volume of data consumed
by mobile internet users will continue to grow exponentially, as people
start streaming their music libraries, TV shows etc to their devices.
4) Somebody has to pay for all this.
What we have is a
scenario where mobile operators will need to massively boost the
capacity of their networks, and be rewarded for that investment by
increased revenues and more customers, despite a market trend of prices
decreasing and competition increasing.
Mobile internet
connections are much smarter than copper wire. They know where you are,
your spending habits, the places you regularly visit, the people you
are in frequent contact with, the times of day you tend to be most and
least active, and they have a beautifully integrated payment system
that people are extremely comfortable with using.
Putting that
smart pipe to good use is something every operator that wants to
survive will need to do. Deals like the one done between du and
Facebook are a good example of one approach to this.
Media and
internet companies like Facebook or The National have a real interest
in pushing their content and platform to as many people as possible. If
that push can include some miniscule payment from each user, even
better. It is not difficult to imagine a future where mobile companies
use their "package" of sites to lure customers: "Your $40 monthly
data package includes unlimited access to the Financial Times," etc.
Now,
multiply that by the location-awareness of the mobile phone, and you
get even more interesting opportunities. You can watch the latest
episodes of House for free while you are in a Starbucks, or get a premium daily news bulletin podcast free each morning while you drive to work.
Of course, all of this comes with a cost. The web of the future will be
much more fragmented, tiered and discriminatory than the
one-size-fits-all internet we have today. Two people sitting next to
each other might get completely different websites when loading the
same address, depending on which network they are on. Just like some
people don't have the right TV package to get Premier League football
today, in the future you might not have the right internet package to
get YouTube.
This is one of the pillars of the idea of net neutrality, which
basically is a call against the concept of network operators doing
deals with content providers, like du has done with Facebook. But that
is a topic for another day.