Socially Desirable Development of M-Commerce: The Role of Regulation

Abstract

We address the recent development in European m-commerce related regulation in the light of socially desirable information society. We define the socially desirable m-commerce as follows: the majority of citizens can access services from anywhere at an affordable price. The deployment of regulatory measures in setting the arena of development for m-commerce is highly dependent on the vision of the future. We illustrate that in the mobile communications market, the vision of regulator is to guarantee ensure effective competition between networks and services. Some argue that the effective competition would require a common infrastructure, whereas some others would rely on the competition between proprietary networks. Against this backdrop, we explain the scope of current European legislation relevant to mobile commerce and discuss it in three different scenarios developed in the MobiCom research project. Our analysis emphasizes the importance of competing at the level of services instead of at the level of propriety network infrastructures. This could mean extensive merging of networks and improving the relative position of service developers.