Consider the following scenarios:
- Advertisers pay you to promote products on your Instagram account, but you missed some valuable gigs whilst you were disconnected from your network because of a mistake by your operator
- You routinely win cash prizes in online competitive games like Fortnite, but were unable to do so for a period because your account was hijacked
- Your new social networking business was adding thousands of users each day, but they were all lost when a dispute with your cloud provider led to the termination of service without warning
These are real issues because games, advertising and social networking are some of the main reasons people use their phones and broadband connections. A reliable environment encourages growth. Hacks, slip-ups and unfairness make people upset. Victims of a crime or an outage may also seek compensation, but the provider responsible for the outage may understandably resist becoming liable for all the exotic business models that were built upon the platform they provided.
These are slippery and evolving problems. The risk is they will get worse over time. Telecom industry expert, author and analyst Edward Finegold discussed these issues for this Wednesday’s episode of RAG Television. I could try to repeat the gist of the fascinating conversation but that would be impossible because it covered such varied subjects as the influence of hyperscalers like AWS and Google, whether social media firms should be regulated like telephony providers, the hijacking of online accounts by imposters, the real rate of SIM swap frauds, if the arguments for net neutrality are crumbling, and who should validate online identities. See and hear the conversation for yourself; you will find the video at the RAG website or you can watch it below.
