the Digital Town Hall

For the rest of the world, open wireless networks are the key to getting new people online. Last month's Wall Street Journal had an article about this, "Poorer Nations Go Online on Cellphones"

The article talks about how people in places like Jakarta are using mobile phones to go online rather than paying for an extra device and connection service for their homes. It's an interesting article and I recommend reading it. (If you want to receive articles like it in your inbox each morning, sign up for Benton's Headlines service.)

The most remarkable thing about the article is that it could have been written about Brooklyn. While the market here emphasizes iPhones and other fancy devices, mobile data usage in the US is definitely not restricted to wealthy people supplementing their broadband-connected computers.

The biggest difference between lower income urban neighborhoods and so-called emerging markets in other countries is that the policies regulating mobile phone use in those countries encourages openness and innovation (at least moreso than in the US). That article says that 200,000 people download the Opera mobile browser every day. I'm sure there are many early adopters on this list, but how many of us have made a choice of browsers for our mobile phone?

That's bad for all of us, but it means that the people in this country who use a cellular phone as their primary communications device are completely lacking some of the key freedoms of the Internet - the ability to use the device of your choosing, customized with the applications you want. That's something we need to change in 2009.

The problem: a government-sanctioned duopoly - AT&T and Verizon - built on a legacy of monopoly profits. A blog post on ZDNet, "End the carrier veto over mobile technology," gets it exactly right: "So here is my economic stimulus plan. Break up the duopoly. Add more unlicensed spectrum. Force AT&T and Verizon to run their mobile networks as Internet networks, not as private fiefdoms. There may be less carrier revenue overall as a result, but there will be tremendous economic growth for everyone."

I bet if the OECD ranked mobile broadband usage, the US would be even further behind - and dropping faster - in that category than we are in adoption of fixed broadband service. Yet this strategy - high speed, open wireless connections - is the one that's working to shrink the global digital divide. We could stand to learn a thing or two from those emerging markets.