Creating something new requires courage, cooperation and trust
Operators are currently offered a world view where they can be either 1) an excellent provider of connections, 2) a digital telco that also offers other digital value-added services, or 3) an ICT player that offers not only connections but also other services to companies. Excellent ideas, but somehow I miss more imagination and options.
The world is currently talking about Metaverse and Web 3.0. Metaverse broadly refers to virtual reality and augmented reality. Web 3.0, on the other hand, is the next generation of the internet, which offers decentralized trust and enables the reduction of various intermediaries. This certainly offers companies the opportunity to combine physical, virtual and augmented reality in the purchase transaction and offers huge new opportunities for targeting, profiling and anonymous trading with different avatars and roles. The consumer's personality can be built into several different characters and meet people's needs better than now. It's a wonderful thing and if all this can be done so that the merchant gets his money and the person can keep his anonymity, then what could be better.
Why investors, operators and regulators are not excited about the role of operators in the Metaverse or Web 3.0. Why doesn't the world's largest and most complex network (contractual, technical and legal) talk about how it combines its resources and builds its own Metaverse, which operates around the globe enabled by operators and does it in such a way that trust can be maintained and new transactions can be built on it. Wouldn't it be great if you could use an avatar created by the operator when you shop in a Chinese online store, visit a supermarket in Paris or buy food directly from an organic farm in Kuopio. It is of course possible that a character offered by Facebook or Fortnite will do the same, but at least I am a bit suspicious of where my information will end up. In addition, if the operator messes up, it's easy for the authorities to find the local operator at the door of the head office, even if Web 3.0 is behind all the messing around.
You can try to control the whole thing with legislation, but if it's a revolution, the legislator won't get there until the possible mild phenomena and of course also the opportunities for growth have already arisen and they can be regulated. In that case, it may already be too late. The strength of the operators is in their natural network, and we should build on it even now. The opposite is the individual huge giants who strive to create a monopoly in their own vertical, and the natural counterweight to this would be a global network created by decentralized operators? Global cooperation and growth could offer an alternative to local competition in a saturated market where the only option is to talk about the price of connections. Is cooperation so difficult that it's not even worth trying? At least it can't be about money?
