Steve Chen, co-founder and chief technical officer of YouTube, shared some of the obstacles that outsiders face when seeking to innovate in the mobile environment. He recalled that in 2006, the YouTube team estimated that YouTube videos would be viewed on mobile devices just as frequently as on computer screens by the end of 2007. It hasn't turned out that way. “That was before we knew anything about the challenges of the mobile phone,” he said.

The opportunities for video in the mobile space remain robust: 30- to 90-second clips offer an ideal viewing experience on mobile; the lower-quality resolution is less of a factor on the small screen; the interface is well-suited for typing short descriptions and comments; GPS enables videos to be associated with specific locations. However, Chen said, “The same issues we faced 18 months ago are still there.” The technological hurdles of playing video and audio in multiple formats can be overcome. But the business hurdles remain daunting. Any company looking for a widespread presence in the mobile space needs to negotiate separate deals with each of the major carriers, all of whom want 12-month exclusives. “Nobody’s willing to open up their network in any meaningful way. It’s very slow going. It’s nothing like what it was with the desktop side, where we had control over the entire user experience.”

In corporate America, mobile campaigns are just beginning to take off. Consultant Theda Sandiford said one of her clients, a music label, increased its budget for mobile from zero to 5 percent of its marketing budget over the past year. “We're building online communities around artists with the help of mobile devices. We're finding ways that the music industry can benefit financially beyond ringtones and the little plastic discs they sell. If record companies are doing this, we're on the edge of something pretty exciting."

Katrin Verclas, head of MobileActive.org, said many of the nongovernmental organizations she works with still don't know how to incorporate mobile as a part of their overall strategy. “They say, 'How do I do this? I don’t even know where to begin.' So there are real knowledge barriers, both strategic and tactical, to overcome.”

Roundtable participants identified three key barriers that stand in the way of mobile's widespread use in the civic sphere: cost to users, the closed nature of mobile networks and the lack of access to broadband mobile in rural areas.

Barriers of price

Derrick Oien, co-founder and president of Intercasting Corp., said, “If I'm a consumer in East Palo Alto who has to pay money to text message or to access data services, I probably won't do it. That's a crippling barrier, and ultimately that’s the core issue."

Jeffrey Abramson of Brandeis University raised the issue of equal access to the mobile Internet, drawing a parallel to the widening disparity of income levels in the United States. “Affordability on the Internet is largely solved,” he said. “But mobile phones are expensive and increasingly treated as a fashion accessory. The entire ringtone business, generating billions in revenues for a few large players, strikes me as an enormous scam.”

Deb Levine of ISIS pointed out that the costs of a traditional mobile campaign are prohibitively expensive for most nonprofits. But a few have begun taking innovative steps to route around cost barriers. “The first time out when you call a mobile aggregator, first you have to purchase your short code, then you have to do the engineering, then it costs $2,500 to $3,000 a month to reach all the providers. That’s a lot of money for a nonprofit. What we’ve seen as a successful strategy for nonprofits is to piggyback by building a partnership with your aggregator’s corporate clients. That's what ISIS has done, and we get unlimited network services.”

The pricing structure for texting has been a particularly formidable barrier to overcome. When a donor gives to a nonprofit via text, more than half of the contribution goes to the telephone carrier, leaving less than 50 percent to the nonprofit. “That’s an unacceptable margin for most charities,” Katrin Verclas said. Combined with low donation caps—no more than $5 per SMS with a total of five SMS for a $25 donation—and other charges for short codes and mobile vendors, nonprofits have not seen a clear pathway to mobile giving campaigns.

But Verclas writes on her Mobileactive.org site that this is about to change.  The Mobile Giving Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, recently brokered a deal with the four major carriers in the United States and with the United Way. Under the agreement, the carriers waived all fees, allowing the United Way to collect 90 percent of the donations with 10 percent going to the foundation. Writes Verclas:

This has not happened before other than in major disasters like Hurricane Katrina and more recently the California fires, when the carriers waived their fees for mobile text donations to the Red Cross.

In an interview with MobileActive, Jim Manis, who is the CEO of the Mobile Giving Foundation and a former wireless executive, anticipated that in the next six months the Mobile Giving Foundation will have agreements with all carriers, waiving fees for approved nonprofit organizations and campaigns. [45]

Barriers of closed networks

In addition to price hurdles, the lack of network openness looms as an equally critical factor in constraining the growth of a mobile civic sphere. While the Roundtable did not devote a great deal of time to the issue of network neutrality, several members raised the specter that the mobile Internet could turn into a patchwork of walled-off proprietary gardens operated by the major carriers, lacking the openness, distributed nature and absence of central control that proved to be instrumental to the growth of the World Wide Web.

One cautionary tale came in September 2007 when Verizon Wireless was caught blocking text messages from the pro-abortion group NARAL Pro-Choice America. While Verizon quickly reversed its decision [46], the incident underscored the dangers inherent in a two-tier system where common carriers cannot discriminate against communications over land lines but mobile carriers are permitted to act as gatekeepers in the marketplace of ideas.

In Europe, mobile carriers exert far less control over the kinds of applications that run on portable devices than do their counterparts in the United States. Thus, independent developers have a greater incentive to devise software that caters to a wide swath of users.

Ken Banks of kiwanja.net warned that Europe will continue to outpace the United States in creative uses of mobile media if the U.S. maintains its position of refusing to open up its mobile systems. Without centralized control by the carriers, mobile applications can be freely shared on almost any cell phone. “If you open up the network, all sorts of possibilities reveal themselves,” he said.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, we may be nearing an inflection point in the U.S. mobile marketplace. Analysts predict the wireless networks will follow the pattern of the Internet, where walled-garden communities like AOL once dominated but gave way to the open Web.

Why the tension now, in contrast to, say, six months ago? The catalysts are threefold, said [analyst David] Weiden: the proliferation of new technologically advanced mobile phones, greater bandwidth and increased competition. But mainstream consumers too are being conditioned to expect more, particularly after the debut of the iPhone which offers easy-to-use Web browsing, Wi-Fi capabilities and high-quality video.

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the relationship between software developers, carriers and handset makers can only change because the way that consumers relate to their phones is changing too.

“On a personal level, the phone feels more like property,” said Mr. Wu. “Once you start to make it yours, you feel like you have more rights to it. It will have a huge effect if you don’t feel free to do what you want.” [47]

In addition, two Google-backed initiatives may portend even greater disruptive changes in the mobile marketplace, with significant potential for expanding civic discourse via mobile devices.

The first was the Federal Communications Commission’s order in July 2007, at the urging of Google and other open-network advocates, requiring that licensees of a large chunk of the valuable 700-MHz band of spectrum allow consumers to use the handset and applications of their choice in this spectrum block subject to certain reasonable network management conditions.  Verizon Wireless won a majority of these licenses at auction in 2008. As a consequence, a new generation of mobile devices is expected to interoperate with one another on Verizon’s network.

In addition to spectrum, platforms matter. The second development that may lessen the chokehold that wireless carriers now exert in the mobile space is the rise of open operating systems and open development environments. Today, mobile carriers support a hodgepodge of closed operating systems, including BREW, Java, Linux, RIM, Symbian and Windows Mobile. But these proprietary systems often have serious restrictions and limited functionalities. It’s likely that not one in 1,000 mobile users can tell whether their phone runs Symbian, RIM or something else. But we’ll get smarter about our phone’s operating system as the phones get smarter and more open.

The "open handset" initiative making the biggest stir is the one with a code name worthy of a sci-fi flick: Android, a free software system based on Linux open-source technology that is designed to run on a wide variety of mobile phones. Google has pitched it as the next revolution in mobile computing. Already Android, by contrast, is a new, more open operating system that is designed to run on a wide variety of mobile phones. Android has attracted a consortium of 45 companies that have agreed to develop applications for it. Dubbed the Open Handset Alliance, the group was formed with the stated goal of "fostering innovation on mobile devices and giving consumers a far better user experience than much of what is available on today's mobile platforms." [48] Google’s plan is to give away software and services in exchange for income generated from targeted mobile advertising.

Chris Boyer, assistant vice president, External Affairs and Regulatory, AT&T, told the participants, "In our view, ‘openness’ is really about giving consumers the choices they want, whether it’s among devices, applications, or operating systems. The wireless market is fiercely competitive, and the carriers that are most responsive to consumers are the ones that are best positioned in the marketplace."

In a similar vein, AT&T rival Verizon recently announced that it will open its network by the end of 2008 to enable subscribers to use handsets, software and applications not offered by the carrier. CEO Lowell McAdam admitted the carrier would not have made the decision had Google's Android not pushed the industry in that direction. [49]

In February 2008 at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, AOL announced a different approach called the Open Mobile Platform, which the company plans to release to developers in summer 2008. AOL says the software development platform will help developers create applications across major mobile device operating systems. Unlike Google's Android, which is an alternative operating system, Open Mobile is a software development platform for multiple operating systems that aims to make it easier for developers to deploy applications that would work on almost any mobile device.

Another push toward open platforms came at the same gathering in Spain when Yahoo announced oneConnect, a new mobile phone service that integrates e-mail, instant messaging and social networks. It features an open architecture, meaning users will eventually be able to run a host of other applications on it. OneConnect will alert you when your contacts arrive in town, tell you whether they want to meet and show you a list of their recent e-mail messages that you have left unanswered. The service will go live by June, and will work with services including Google's Gmail and GoogleTalk, AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft's Outlook Web mail. [50]

Bill Coleman of Cassatt Corp. observed that the marketplace will shake out and ultimately support perhaps two mobile platforms, just as in the desktop computing space:

In 10 years there will be no difference between what you can do on your PC, your TV or mobile device. The global economy is heading toward a quadruple convergence in which everything is run on IP (the Internet). Within 15 years there will be a tremendous convergence of telco service providers, cable service providers, ISPs [Internet service providers] and portals into one industry, which evolves into community utility service providers. What that means on a global scale is that if you have broadband, you can buy from anyone. The winners will be those companies that can deploy the most amount of capital. It’s all about scale and capital, and today there are only two industries that have access to capital of that magnitude: the telcos like AT&T and Verizon, which probably have an advantage over the second group, the technology companies like Google and Microsoft.

Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org said one of the exciting things about Android and similar efforts is that if the mobile space "opens up even a crack," it could have widespread positive consequences for civic engagement. "There is a billion-dollar NGO market for innovative applications specific to NGOs that is just waiting to be unleashed," she said. While the mass media tend to focus on mobile games, ringtones and video clips of celebrities, developers are also working on applications to advance civic goals and humanitarian efforts.

Barriers of access

Mary Evslin, chairman of the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, raised the issue that residents of rural counties across the nation lack access to both basic and high-speed mobile services. People who live in rural Vermont—which makes up more than 60 percent of the state's land area—still have no access to broadband today and limited access to mobile phone coverage, even though it's the eighth smallest state in land area. The Telecommunications Authority's mandate is to ensure that the state's entire populace has fixed high-speed Internet access, nomadic Internet access and mobile phone coverage by the end of 2010. Said Evslin:

The problem is quite simple.  Let me give you a concrete example: Comcast has a national policy that is based on an algorithm requiring that the company must recoup its capital expenditures within five years. In general, they will lay cable in a given mile only if there are at least 15 residences and a 60 percent subscription rate. But many parts of rural America have three houses per linear mile.

How do those people get high-speed Internet access so that they can take advantage of all the great services and civic engagement efforts we've been discussing? How do their kids do the homework that teachers are beginning to require? How will their small businesses be able to order parts?  How will the elderly be able to have new appliances that monitor their health remotely?

It amounts to rural discrimination. At my house there is no cable, and until last week no DSL. There was only a WISP [wireless internet service provider] with miserable speeds.  In some places there is only satellite. Rural America has been forgotten. We're the have-nots. States have been trying to take up the task with very limited resources. We need a national policy so that rural America can develop parity and obtain equal access to our democratic infrastructure and civic institutions.

Regardless of how mobile technology and wireless platforms evolve, Joaquin Alvarado argued, the predominant players in this space need to adopt an infrastructure that supports society's public policy goals and serves all constituencies: "We need to create an institutional framework that supports a young person having access to contextually driven information and educational resources informed by all the institutions we’ve invested in for the past 200 years to support this democracy."