Open Mobile Internet Now!

Just ask Skype's government affairs director, Christopher Libertelli. His company's cheap calling application for the iPhone couldn't gain Apple's approval unless it crippled its own software to prevent its use on AT&T's data service. The app launched last week, but is only available over a WiFi connection.

“The future looks closed, where only the applications that conform to the dictates of the carriers get in the hands of consumers," Libertelli said.

Wireless companies are eager to portray a future when consumers will have internet access everywhere in their palms of their hands. But the rough mobile internet beast slouching towards us on these wireless networks shares few similarities with the wired internet most of us use in the office and at home.

Consumers and regulators would not stand for a DSL provider refusing to let a customer use an Apple laptop or stopping them from visiting YouTube or using low-cost calling services like Rebtel or Gizmo Project. But expectations aren't the same when it comes to mobile phones, in part because the carriers have almost always been in control of the devices, bundling them with service plans. As a result, carriers have the motive and opportunity to add only the apps they like and hobble features they can't control, such as WiFi chips.

This situation exists in large part because the Federal Communications Commission has never explicitly said whether its internet neutrality rules, known as the Broadband Policy Statement, apply to wireless networks. Those 1995 principles require cable and DSL internet providers to allow their customers to freely traverse the net, run whatever programs they like, attach whatever devices they'd like and have providers, app developers and content providers compete with each other.

Skype petitioned the FCC in 2007 to put the nation's wireless services on regulatory par with the phone network and cable and DSL broadband offerings. But then-FCC head Kevin Martin was not a fan of the proposal (.pdf), and the petition lingers unresolved to this day due to odd bureaucratic wrangling.

Now that the iPhone has shown the U.S. that the future will be both wireless and wired, regulators will only face increasing pressure to step in and end the uncertainty.

But until then, carriers will continue to lock their phones, prohibit users from using devices not sold by them, shut off users for violating unwritten bandwidth caps, stifle innovation by banning apps from their phones, cripple their phones' built in capabilities and outlaw services that compete with their own streaming media services.

Though Apple's iPhone application store is controlled by capricious and authoritarian rules, it nonetheless stands as the mobile world's best example of the value of openness. Apple initially locked out all third-party developers, but after its techie customers forced open the devices, the company finally released a software development tool kit. Now, Apple's own marketing points to the wide selection of third-party iPhone software as among the device's most valuable features.

This is a lesson in openness that the wireless companies have so far refused to learn. Joe Costello, CEO of internet streaming start-up Orb, says carriers like Verizon have been “dogged" at stymieing his company's software, which lets user's access live TV, music and movies from their home computers on any device with a browser.

Costello speaks of technology competition like a typical Silicon Valley libertarian-leaning entrepreneur, and Orb has, like most tech start ups, stayed out of policy discussions in D.C. But Costello is of a different mind when it comes to forcing openness in wireless networks.

“I think it's a good place for the government to act," he said. “It's not like a hundred start-ups will come in and change the game, so you have to ask what policy will fix this. You have this small set of guys that control every move you make," he added. “If the actual internet had been controlled like this, we would still be in bulletin board mode."

The carriers say that an open market and competition for subscriber dollars make regulation unnecessary. At the same time, all four major U.S. carriers ban all peer-to-peer applications, and most prohibit the use of streaming media services not controlled by the carrier. All four also ban users from tethering their mobile devices to their laptops to feed the data connection to that device, though some allow that if a user pays an extra fee.

The wireless operators say they need the ability to constrain what apps run on their network and what devices connect in order to ensure smooth network operation.

The reasoning is eerily similar to the argument -- long since proven false -- that Ma Bell used in 1955 when it fought to prevent its customers from using phones it hadn't approved, or from plugging any non-approved device into a phone jack.

“It would be extremely difficult to furnish 'good' telephone service if telephone users were free to attach to the equipment, or use with it, all of the numerous kinds of foreign attachments that are marketed by persons who have no responsibility for the quality of telephone service but are primarily interested in exploiting their products," AT&T wrote at the time.

The rejection of that logic led to the football phone, the fax machine and, eventually, the modem -- and thus the public internet.