Legislating and regulating "problems" that are just about to solve themselves is a real problem in either national economic "planning" or regulation. Most of you are too young to remember the real and serious debates and dialogues held by telecom policymakers back in the 1970s and 1980s about how to provide telephone service to "one billion people who have never made a phone call." The daunting problem seemed intractable. But policymakers back then had no idea "mobile service" was about to revolutionize communications, making it now a silly question to worry about how to provide communications service to those billion people. These days, most people in developing regions have, or soon will have, mobile phone service.
Some might argue we more recently, in the United States, thought the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first major reform of the U.S. telecom framework since 1934, would introduce more competition in communications, and promote innovation.
That was just about the point that the Internet, broadband, mobility and applications were about to cause wholesale changes in user experience, user expectations and the product life cycles of any number of products, including fixed line voice services.
These days, you would be hard pressed to find a highly-placed telecommunications executive who would argue that voice revenues in the future will be anything but smaller than they are today, both in the fixed line and the mobile environments.
Despite the good intentions, policymakers tried to stimulate competition in voice services right at the point that voice services were about to reach the peak of the product life cycle, and then enter the declining stage.
Some might argue that growing scrutiny of Microsoft a decade ago likewise was misplaced. Microsoft was about to hit a period when Internet-based applications were going to undermine its potential "monopoly" in any case. Regulators honestly worried that Microsoft's dominance of PC operating systems would lead to domination of browsers.
These days regulators seem to worry that Google's presence in PC-based search advertising will give it "unfair" advantage in mobile services, mobile banking or mobile advertising and social networks. There is not much evidence that Google has actually been so successful at dominating the many other potential businesses it seeks to enter, or has entered.
"While it's true that Google's stranglehold on mobile search and associated ad spending is near 100 per cent, according to recent reports, it's equally true that most of the "search" consumers do on their mobile devices isn't the kind that Google controls," the Register notes.
In fact, the common thinking now is that Facebook and other social sites are becoming the way people use search in a mobile context.
