Telecommunications

Business as usual: Cable and phone companies still want customers to play by their rules: predetermined bundles of TV channels, limits on Internet bandwidth, compatibility with only certain phone handsets. This mentality has put them at odds with customers—giving cable and satellite TV companies the lowest in customer satisfaction among all industries covered in the American Customer Satisfaction Index published by the University of Michigan in 2007.

Business like Google: A Google-run cable and telecom operator would "be a platform that exists to help us do what we want to do," writes Jarvis. Such a company would push, as Google attempted to do, to free the "white spaces" between TV channels to create an open, high-speed wireless network. It would profit by serving ads on a wide range of mobile and Internet services that unite local communities and enable people to watch and interact with the content they pay for wherever they are. Google stopped short of building its own phones or a telecom network, but its Android mobile operating system, which any phone manufacturer can use, is a step in the right direction.