TODAY’S INNOVATIVE web and mobile technologies risk following the path taken by radio, TV and film, and move from being open and entrepreneurial markets to markets monopolised by one or several large companies.

This is according to Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who spoke yesterday about the future of telecommunications at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin.

Mr Wu said he was writing a book that ponders the question of whether it is a natural progression or a choice for new technology to follow the pattern of invention, founding, opening up into an all-inclusive entrepreneurial market and then being dominated by the major company in the market.

Radio and film followed this pattern in the early 1900s and today’s newest technologies: mobile phones, television and computers, could likely follow it as well, he said.

When a state regulates these industries they should aim to have a market entry price which makes it possible for a large number of people to start a new company, Mr Wu said. When the cost of market entry is too high, like the mobile phone market in the United States, the market will stagnate.

What a regulator should not do is help the dominant figure destroy the other new companies, something which Mr Wu said may seem obvious but is often what happens.

Communications regulators should be more conscious that they are the leading speech regulators and make sure they are not limiting free speech.

Mr Wu expects that we will see how TV, computers and mobile phones interact and compete with each other over the next 10 years.