I don't agree. Google wants the web standards that allow their products (sites) to work well to become standards. The browser is the means to this end but for a web standard to become a standard requires more than one browser to support it. By funding Mozilla they can encourage this to happen. He's absolutely right in saying that Mozilla "winning" is not an issue however they would probably like it not to win too much so they can continue to exert pressure on new features through Chrome.

Sticking my fingers into a cold fog all day seems highly unappealing.

In Chinese: 'We welcome foreign companies to invest and develop here, and we will continue to foster an open policy market.'

In English: 'We really want you to come here so that we can rip your IP off and then compete with you in your local markets with prices that are very low due to our feudal employment policies and government subsidies. In fact, Germany you are not moving enough production to China and we need you to because we haven't managed to spy on you much because your security is too good and we aren't smart enough to copy your stuff.'

They don't need any exploits. The calls are not encrypted inside their networks.

In fact. Don't speed up either.

I'm not sure this is necessary. The wholesaler's only interest is to maximize the return on their network investment. Fill the pipe with the most valuable traffic. I don't really mind how they do that. I absolutely agree that retailers can use multiple wholesalers and that wholesalers should be barred from creating contract terms that tie a retailer to them.

The technical compatibility problems will probably continue until tunable, software definable radios become a reality for handsets. That still seems to be a few years away.

There is a very simple solution to this. Split wholesale wireless provision from retail. One law. If you choose to build a network you may not sell it to end users only to resellers.Contract terms for retailers must be equal for the same commitments. Start of real competition. End of problem.

Actually I did a little research on this and it has been anticipated and fixed as an issue (see http://playground.sun.com/ipv6/specs/ipv6-address-privacy.html) ... perhaps ... there is some randomization and temporal cycling of auto assigned IPv6 addresses although not everything seems to implement this at present. The worry for me is that it is possible and it is very difficult for the average consumer to detect (and understand) so it is likely to be used. NATing and more importantly the generally dynamic nature of IPV4 addresses as you roam around between home, work and mobile helps to enforce (although does not ensure) privacy.

That isn't practical with IPV4 but with IPV6 it seems to me that it may become possible. A negative effect of IPV6 that I had not thought of before.

The big difference in the European markets versus the US is that there is a wholesale market for subscriptions. In the US the carriers sell direct to retailers whereas in Europe subscriptions are also sold via wholesalers. Given that these wholesalers can buy phones from any manufacturer and themselves subsidize the phone by bundling with a subscription any phone can be brought to market (assuming it has type approval). Some US phones don't even have SIM cards so the US market locks customers far more to their carrier.

So there is more competition in the European market and less control by the carriers of which phones consumers can buy. This means that phone brands are more powerful. That said, some carriers still try to impose their branding in the actual phone (i.e. Orange).

We're still not in the very desirable state of the phone operators being reduced to pure pipes unfortunately.