As noted in an earlier post about Facebook, the buzzword of choice for this CTIA show has been “open.” It’s been tossed around by everybody to the point where it’s meaningless, really. The word itself is pretty straightforward, but it’s been twisted and manipulated here to basically mean whatever the person saying it wants it to mean.

Content providers say they want more open networks from operators. Open in this context means they want unfettered access to operators’ subscribers, but with an infrastructure they can use to make money from them. Operators say they want to provide open networks, too, but to them, open means networks where users have the freedom to do anything, as long as it’s something of which the operator approves (or makes them some cash). And so on and so on, from handset vendors to marketing companies to the booth cleaners...More after the jump…

A few salient points to consider here: First, despite all the lip service paid to being “open”, is the mobile industry, and the mobile content business in particular, moving that way at all? Hardly. All of this desire for things to be so open is really a nice way of everybody saying they want everybody else to get out of their way, regardless of the potential value they can add. Openness generally tends to imply inclusiveness and acceptance, not simply the freedom to do your own thing to the exclusion of all others.

Second, what will all this supposed openness really do for consumers? There’s little doubt that certain obstacles do exist in the mobile content market, and are holding it back. But if removing them in the name of openness means removing all the “closed” systems that are useful for consumers too, is that such a positive development? Again, openness implies some inclusion, so a truly open ecosystem would accept both the independent (or, put another way, off-deck) market and the more closed operator-driven (or on-deck) market as well.

The two actually go well together, and can both thrive given the chance. There are a lot of users who appreciate the simplicity of accessing content through an operator portal and are satisfied with that approach; likewise, there are a lot of users who to access content of their own choosing, regardless of whether it’s on or off the operator deck. Actual openness would see both approaches utilized and optimized to provide the best experience for customers, giving them the freedom to choose how they want to do things.

Some people are starting to figure this out. For instance, in Tuesday’s panel about off-deck content and billing, the Novarra CEO Jayanthi Rangarajan said that within 30 days of launching the company’s transcoding system to allow its subscribers to access any HTML web site through their mobile phone’s browser, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) UK saw its on-deck content sales jump. So there’s an “open” system, created to improve the off-deck experience, benefiting the “closed” Vodafone portal.

The point is that growth in one doesn’t have to come at the expense of the other. Until that lesson is truly understood, by operators, content providers and everybody else in the industry, openness will remain little more than a buzzword, and the market will be held back from reaching its true potential.

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