Hi 4321,
Well, I think you know what my thoughts are and I don't want to bore you into submission via repetition. I saw your circle jerk post before it was taken down (the deletion policies are quite variable these days). So - like the Borg - I know you are sensitive to my resistance. ;-)
To an extent you and I are ships passing in the night, as you are talking technology and I am talking commercial politics. In the end, I think the technology will conform to the commercial politics - or to its trade-offs. Long process of adaptation and negotiation. But that's just me.
I would be more than happy to concede the whole debate if I could see something showing the acquiescence of the MNOs in a level playing field trust architecture. But I haven't. Always, the list of designers of these trust schemes seems to exclude the MNOs. I find their exclusion suggestive.
From a supply side view, I think it's all about controlling the customer and extracting the value from the data flow. The desire to secure the model to the nth degree is subsidiary in the MNOs' eyes to their desire to make as many bucks as they can.
To the extent the TCG architecture conflicts with the MNOs' interests, I expect them to object to it, delay it, push it to committee at the last minute, amend the design etc.
So what I have done is to try to figure the MNOs' interests and then to see how those compare with the TCG's aims.
In one article I posted, the MNOs have explicitly said they fear being relegated to becoming merely a bitpipe for data transfer. Another telco paper I linked described how they were thinking about taxing the value of the television and movie data flow (that is, the price of the programs rather than the amount of bits flowing through the system). The eWallet scheme appears to have them participating in taxing the value of financial data (again, not the flow of bits but the value of the transactions). On the other hand, the TCG white paper seems to see the use of mobile dataflow in an encrypted form as the MTMs' greatest selling point: who knows what kind of data is flowing through their pipes. The MNOs will benefit from increased data flows but not from transactional values. These look like conflicting objectives to me.
The NFC Forum article and the Booz piece both point to the fact that the MNOs intend to control the application flow and imply they will exclude other sources of applications within the mobile infrastructure. The TCG and Wave's TAN provide an applet distribution model outside their control. These look like conflicting objectives.
The GSMA folks say they "they want the SIM to be the de facto secure element". The HCI interface pushes the digital traffic to and from the subsidiary secure elements through the SIM. Whereas the TCG model appears to see the SIM as one of several elements in the system, without any particular priority. These look like conflicting objectives.
These are three different examples, but they all adhere to the same principle. The mobile phone people see taxing the value of transactions, rather than the value of the flow of bits, as their gigantic opportunity.
Now maybe they have conceded this ground somewhere along the way. It is really very hard to get real-time insights. The information flow is ropey. You have to read a lot between the lines anyway. Clearly they feel they were outwitted by Apple and this is one thing I need to google a bit more. This could push them in either direction: towards being more controlling or simply to accept the reality that the gigantic opportunity is going to elude them.
When I think from a customer viewpoint, I see the level playing field you describe as a far preferrable system. I see it putting loads of parasitic organisations out of business. People like the credit card companies (and the banks) who tax the transaction value rather than charging a fixed fee per transaction. That is what I would like to see. But I doubt I will.
I guess I've grown a reluctant respect for the power of incumbent suppliers. Years go by without explanation. They survive somehow in spite of the opportunity to replace them with cheaper alternatives.
Awk's been talking about Arm's Trustzone for much of a decade and yet it seems still to be a proposal more than a plan. I think this has everything to do with politics. NFC was ready to roll in 2009, but those guys are also still waiting their turn. I notice the rumours of Apple joining in are now well and truly defunct with the new iPhone having no embedded NFC features.
I think you respect the uncertainty of the timeline in the mobile space. I'm not sure I know what the source of your uncertainty is. Given your set of beliefs, why do you think adoption will take up to two years?
What I am saying is that I think the MNOs are the key source of the delay. And unfortunately, they may take longer than two years to be done objecting.
Conversely, on the positive side, I've also described three or four ways in which I think their objections may be overturned: government security demands; individual MNO rebellions; Wave's enterprise concentration etc.
Because of all of this, the timeline is utterly opaque to me.
I was the tiresome voice of caution over the timeline with Wave in the PC space. I suspect that is why some folks are willing to listen to me this time. This doesn't mean I am right, of course! For sure, I am on a frolick of my own, without help from Wave's insiders and suchlike. So I am using gut instinct as much as anything.
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