Charging for free: Sprint, GPS, and Mobile GMaps
May 22, 2007 | Be the first to comment
Earlier this month, Sprint threatened Mobile GMaps over its use of restricted network-assisted GPS functionality. Mobile GMaps ran into trouble by working around these restrictions to offer an automatic positioning feature. While Sprint simply acted to enforce its policy, the result is unfortunate for everyone - Sprint included - since restricting the capabilities of applications just causes consumer demand to go unmet.
Under its current policy, Sprint must have a business relationship with a vendor before it can release applications that use the network’s GPS services. Sprint has otherwise generally been open to third-party applications without such requirements, but obtaining a subscriber’s location comes with some legitimate concerns. Two examples, which trouble nearly all carriers, are how to protect individual privacy and how to price location services. These can be addressed, however, and still allow for more open policies. Restricting access to network features does not benefit consumer or carrier, and often winds up being futile.
Location services do come with real concerns about user privacy. Most handsets, Sprint’s branded ones included, enforce an opt-in for access to location data. This makes good sense for any sensitive personal information. Yet it still lets you imagine a worst-case scenario, such as a child unwittingly approving access by a malicious application to his or her location. However, having the carriers decide what is safe causes all subscribers to wind up being treated as if they were children. Imagine instead that the person who pays the bill controls which applications are allowed (in this example, the parent). If that were the case, then the carriers would no longer need to filter applications to ensure user privacy, consumers could have access to the applications they want, and parents could still rest easy.
Carriers have made a significant infrastructure investment for location services but have struggled with finding a way to price them. Forcing applications to charge a monthly fee is too complicated: it requires an existing relationship with the carrier and it rules out applications that must be distributed free of cost because of third-party license terms (like the Google Maps API in this case). The simplest - and perhaps best - option is to price unlimited location requests into the data plan. It looks like Sprint has already found a price at which the GPS application can be free of additional cost. Think of all the applications that could benefit were this bundled pricing structure made available to them.
Coming back to Mobile GMaps, the current resolution is to remove the IP address of the location server from the application, although users will be able to enter it in themselves. Restrictive policies inspire users to find a way around them. We’d all be better off seeing that effort focused on creating new services that excite consumers, which in turn could create a new set of customers for the carriers’ data services. 10 years after E911 first kick-started GPS in mobile phones, the number of applications taking advantage of location is still limited. Mobile GMaps reminds us that a lot of them are just waiting for the right opportunity.
Posted by: Mike
Categories: ThisIsBroken, Mobile Market
