Who owns the user data? The users, that's who!!

This week the EU Commission is tightening the screws on the area of deep packet inspection.  Where this will end up is anyones guess, but we are heading down a road that will kill the promise of the communications industry getting into Advertising.   The buzz surrounding this topic has been waxing and waning for several years now.  Everyone gets the concept, but little seems to be happening on the ground.  More broadly, there is a growing belief that service providers can bridge the revenue gap left by the collapse of traditional voice services, by adopting various business models that make use of end user data .  But this seems to make the implicit assumption that Service Providers 'own' their customer data - a notion which various regulators are disabusing them of!

The only way out of this conundrum is for SP's to realise that they need to broker the user data rather than simply try to exploit it. Let the users share in the upside of the transaction and they will be flooded with opportunity. 

Blyk are one of the companies trying this out and seem to be doing OK!  All the regulators have to do is get out of the way of real win-win solutions like this.