Tony Chan wrote:
> How come everybody is referring to i-mode as a walled garden when
> nothing, technically, business model, or otherwise, indicate any walls,
> unless of course, you count factors such as the fact it is based in
> Japan, or that it uses PDC rather than GSM and CDMA.
>
> These are not walls. As far as I can gathered from the information from
> this list and my own research, there is inherently nothing that stops
> developers in, say, America, from publishing a chtml site on a server
> located in London for the i-mode service in Japan. There are obvious
> issues such as, latency when the traffic has to travel all the way
> around the world, language since most i-mode users are still Japanese,
> and business case - what reason do you have to target users half-way
> around the world? But are these really walls?
The wall comes from the fact that i-mode is a monopoly controlled by
NTT DoCoMo: either you play the game their way or you don't play.
Sure, your site *can* be accessed even if it's not on the official
i-mode menu, but it will mean a lot less visitors and, worse yet,
it will make it very difficult to charge for access since DoCoMo
handles micropayments only for registered sites. (The one 3rd-party
charging option out there is a DoCoMo front, and after all
all who but DoCoMo has access to DoCoMo's billing systems?)
I think the best analogy so far is AOL vs the Internet, and I
suspect we'll see similar takeup curves as well. Except that
the competition won't be i-mode vs. WAP, it'll be the i-mode
walled garden (all the official services) vs. the untamed
jungle of the Internet. Right now, the garden has the advantage
because the jungle won't fit in your cellphone, but as
technology progresses I suspect many will find their way out
into the wild world of the full, uncensored Internet.
I wonder what would happen if NTT decided to block off access
to random URLs and only allow navigation within its own
garden? In a true monopoly they'd make even more of a killing
than they're making now, but DDI & J-Phone exist and would
be glad to take those jumping over the wall...
Cheers,
--
Jani PATOKALLIO / jpatokal@iki.fi / +81 90 7722 3557
Sanpo Laboratory, Mechano-Informatics Dept., University of Tokyo
ヤニ・パトカリオ / jani@sanpo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp / 090 7722 3557
東京大学、工学系研究科、機械情報工学科、算法設計研究室
Received on Wed Oct 18 11:30:30 2000