مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

In recent years, since the advent of the iPhone and the similar Android smartphones, there has been a widespread perception that modern mobile data services, with their downloadable apps, Internet access, content billing models, etc., were invented in the USA. This perception exists in popular media as well as in scientific debates. However, those who have studied the often opaque Japanese mobile market know that key mobile data services were invented and marketed successfully before, starting as early as 1998 in Japan. This is only known, however, to two fairly small groups of people. First, there are those who participated in the early debates about NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode and similar services from the competing domestic operators, J-Phone and KDDI. Naturally, many Japanese observers knew about the new services and how and why they were pushed to market, as well as Western experts, analysts and media then sitting in their “watchtowers” in Tokyo, working diligently to uncover what was happening despite almost all crucial information being available only in Japanese.

A second group of people comprised scientists worldwide who were analysing Japan’s emerging mobile Internet ecosystems, but often only at a remove, being forced to rely on the English reports generated by those on site. Some of these read reports on mobile data services, reading documents ranging from contemporary publishers such as Tsuchiyama (2000) to, much more recently, Weber, Haas, and Scuka (2011). Most others in Europe or the US came across the new mobile data services only when Apple introduced them world-wide with big fanfare and so may not have thought to dig into history or to look across the Pacific to check whether the data-driven iPhone Internet ecosystem might have been invented before.

However, history is hugely relevant for those who wish to understand why neither the then-leading European GSM operators and manufacturers, nor the Japanese with their advanced and domestically proven services and handsets, succeeded globally. In a recent issue of Telecommunications Policy (Issue 6, 2015), Richard Feasey, the former Public Policy Director of the Vodafone Group, argued that the (European) telecommunications industry reacted with “confusion, denial and anger” to the challenge posed by the advent of the Internet, that it had been “unprepared” to respond and that it had been “denying the disruptive power of the Internet” (Feasey, 2015). In reaction, it introduced “walled garden” services, which failed. Because of these missteps, he argued, the industry would now have to search for ways to increase their prices to maintain reasonable profits vis-à-vis the US Internet companies. In this comment article, the authors will highlight that the European companies have a long tradition of failure, resulting from factors such as risk aversion and the anxious pursuit of selling data services as expensively as possible. They avoided competition at the level of technology, in contrast to the situation in Japan, and established the mobile “walled gardens” of the early 2000s.