Is Apple the New and Most-Important Gatekeeper?

Is Apple now more a transformative force in technology-using businesses than Google? Some observers have pointed out that it is possible, perhaps even likely, that Apple's equity value will exceed that of Microsoft in the near future. But Apple now is worth more than Google, with a market capitalization around $214 billion, compared to Google's $159 billion.

To be sure, content companies tend to pay more attention to Apple's moves, while communication companies tend to pay more attention to Google. One might argue that in the communications business, Apple mostly has changed the handset business, and user expectations about what can be done with handsets.

It likely will wind up being more transformative than that. Apple has proven that mobile application stores can be a source of huge end user value in the mobile ecosystem, and potentially a huge driver of revenue and margin in a business that is shifting inexorably towards applications as the driver of communications value overall.

Keep in mind that Apple previously redefined the online music business, if not the whole music business, by some estimates. Apple has had less success in the video arena, but the iPad could signal a potential shift of distribution in the print content business, or at least Apple has been arguing that is its objective.

In the mobile business, virtually everyone agrees that Apple changed end user expectations about what a handset should do, how it should work, and also cracked or broke the historic stranglehood mobile service providers have had over handset features.

In the developing mobile Internet experience, for example, there already are glimmers of a shift of experience from "Web" pages to applications. For a firm such as Google, dependent on search revenues for nearly all of its revenue, that potentially shifts revenue away from search and towards the mobile application as the way people find things.

To the extent that the mobile application, supplied by the application store, becomes the gateway for use of Web-based applications, power and financial success shift towards the app store and the device, and away from the access provider

So the issue that naturally arises is what to make of Apple's influence on the broader technology industry, which generally has moved to an "open" model, where Apple continues to operate on a "partially open" model, closed in terms of operating systems and hardware, but open--with editorial control--for applications.

As attention in the U.S. and some other markets now is turning to "gatekeeper" functions, the implications are that gatekeepers of many sorts now are arising in the Internet ecosystem. Though government regulators typically look at access providers, application providers are emerging as equally-important gatekeepers, as operating systems and browsers have caused concern in the past.

"The iPad is seen by many in the print business as a way of delivering high-value digital content to customers paying real money," notes U.K. technology observer John Naughton. There is a price: Apple will control the distribution channel and take a slice of every transaction.

The iPhone and iPad are really just gateways to the Internet, but are controlled (a better word than "closed") experiences, not the "open" or unfiltered way PCs have been used to access the Internet and its resources.

To the extent that gatekeepers are an issue, we likely will see new concerns about application and experience gatekeepers; nothing so crude as "access" gatekeeping.

Some think Google is the greatest emerging gatekeeper. Perhaps it is Apple.

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