By: Michael Crossey

Today, the Big Four giants of the Internet - Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook - seem to own the consumer segment of the digital economy. Moreover, a war has been brewing between these four players for some time now, which is seeing them increasingly collide in the markets for mobile devices, tablets, apps, content and social networking. If operators make the right moves, they can effectively become the arms dealer in the innovation war, leveraging their unique assets to allow the Big Four players to compete with each other over richer, more relevant services, improve customer choice and convenience and, perhaps most importantly, provide new low-friction ways to monetize their services.

The Big Four War

Each of the Big Four has its own unique weapons in its armory, and whilst they did not compete directly in the past, we are now seeing more and more examples of them making strategic moves into the others’ space; Google with its Motorola acquisition and the launch of Google +, Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, Facebook’s developments in Media, Advertising and Communications, and Apple’s Cloud Services and Social Networking features within iTunes. But as these four giants continue to increase their dominance of the technology industry, what does this mean for the network operators?

Operators are not direct contenders in this war, but they are in a unique position, not only providing the connectivity that allows the Big Four to deliver and monetize their digital services, but also being the custodian of a wealth of information about customers as well as having direct billing relationships with, collectively, close to 6 billion consumers globally. The Big Four will continue to generate huge amounts of revenues from “over-the-top” (OTT) services, and no doubt they would like nothing more than for the operators to get out of the way and be relegated to the role of “dumb bit-pipe provider". To prevent this from happening, operators can leverage their capabilities in at least four key areas: