It's a familiar refrain: Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. For telecom operators, the siren's call of the past few years has been to open up the functionality of their networks via open application programming interfaces (APIs), much as major Web players such as Amazon and Google have done. The idea is that such openness would boost innovation and speed new service delivery, two bits of progress much needed in the telecom world. The problem with such an approach, and evidence of it has become apparent in recent months, is that what you end up with is a race to the bottom, where competitors embrace the economics of the Web, open source and emerging cloud computing technologies to turn a high-value game into a low-margin - or even no-margin - one.
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