Long Live The Walled Garden!

[Kris Kumar]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101009' target='_blank'>http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101009</a><br /><br /></div>"You must be "nuts" if you want open Internet access on a mobile phone, says 3 UK's chief operating officer." <br /><br />"Gareth Jones, 3's COO, told New Media Age in no uncertain terms that the carrier doesn't plan to take down its walled garden, evidently buoyed by the relatively good numbers it announced last week."<br /><br />"People don't want open access, that's not what our customers tell us they want," Jones told NMA. "Anyone in their right mind who tries to do anything on the Internet with a screen that size has to be nuts."<br /><br />3's COO definitely has a lot of <i>"guts"</i> to state that the <i>Parental Control</i> like tactics being employed by the company is fair. Its good to have a portal that provides the customers with easy access to the popular sites and resources. The carrier may argue that the fencing prevents the subscribers from accidentally wasting the precious data minutes. But locking them down to a set of sites is a undoubtedly a bad move in the long run. This may work well with new users, but once the customer is comfortable with the phone's browser, they may want to venture out. The <i>walled garden</i> does save them the frustration of typing in a URL and getting a page that does not render well on the small screen. It does frustrate me every time I have typed in a URL and found that I cannot view the page after waiting for a minute. It does make me wonder why can't there be a way of letting me know or preventing me from accessing such sites. But preventing me altogether from doing that is not the best approach. Why can't the carriers provide a switch to let the users decide whether to turn the <i>walled garden</i> on or off? With the browsers getting better on the mobile devices and faster internet access speeds, the <i>walls</i> must crumble. What are your thoughts? Does your carrier employ any restrictive tactics when it comes to internet access?

[Mike Temporale]

"People don't want open access, that's not what our customers tell us they want," Jones told NMA. "Anyone in their right mind who tries to do anything on the Internet with a screen that size has to be nuts."

:rotfl: I guess I must be nuts then. :roll:

[Kevin Daly]

I wonder if an extension to the protocol identifier would be in order for mobile-friendly sites (like the "s" in https, which is also of course identified with a different port than the default for http, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea either).
"httpm" anyone?
I know the idea of a ".mob" extension or whatever it was went down like chunder-flavoured cornflakes, so would a little addition at the other end be more acceptable?

Then again I just woke up so I'm probably talking you-know-what.
Still half in Dreamland.

[popabawa]

"You must be "nuts" if you want open Internet access on a mobile phone, says 3 UK's chief operating officer."

What an idiot.... 8O

An AOL type model makes more sense, direct customers to the 'walled garden' content but make everything else available if you know what you are doing.

I.

[Kris Kumar]

I wonder if an extension to the protocol identifier would be in order for mobile-friendly sites (like the "s" in https, which is also of course identified with a different port than the default for http, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea either).
"httpm" anyone?
I know the idea of a ".mob" extension or whatever it was went down like chunder-flavoured cornflakes, so would a little addition at the other end be more acceptable?

Then again I just woke up so I'm probably talking you-know-what.
Still half in Dreamland.

Those are some pretty good ideas. Just like your httpm:// suggestion, WAP has its own protocol identifier.

I would love it if the sites were to use the following nomenclature when setting up their websites. http://MOBILE.xyz.com or http://xyz.com/MOBILE. And it would be cool if the pocketIE browser would check these two URLs when I type in xyz.com.

Over all I think that the mobile browsers will improve in the next couple of years. They will become more capable of handling complex websites/HTML.