Fig. 15 | How the opening of tech standards, platforms and networks leads to progress OPEN PC STANDARD INDUSTRY 3.0 the 1st digital economy OPEN INTERNET (Net Neutrality) SMARTPHONE digital consumer economy OPEN NETWORK TECH (Open RAN) SELECTIVE OPEN WIRELESS ACCESS INDUSTRY 4.0 the DIGITECCS economy SELECTIVE OPEN PLATFORM ACCESS Source: Digiteccs Associates The phenomenon of tech standards, platforms and networks opening is not simple. Let’s note the following. Complexity. Technologies are often complex, involving multiple layers, which may be interlinked. It is therefore not easy to define what open access into tech standards, platforms or networks exactly means. Tech companies, infrastructure and service providers face tradeoffs. Tech companies, infrastructure and service providers face tradeoffs in relation to opening of their tech standards, platforms and networks, i.e. providing their technology, consumer interfaces and networks to other players. On one hand, opening can make their assets and ecosystems more attractive to bigger customer segments, i.e. boost the scale of their business. On the other hand, they may partially lose control over products delivered through their own assets. Ultimately, they may become dependent on other parties, they may have to deal with such parties and even risk losing competitive advantages to them. The choice to open certain assets are best made by the private companies themselves, however this can be impacted by visionary policies. Successful cases of opening are usually ‘voluntary’, i.e. the technology, infrastructure and service providers make such choice based on their commercial interests. However, these choices can still be significantly influenced by visionary policies, which may either encourage the established private entities to make transformational moves, or attract new private entities with different business models into the market (e.g. open access infrastructure companies). Despite their advantages, it is impossible to universally claim that open solutions are always superior to proprietary ones. It is impossible to say that open tech standards, platforms and networks are always better than proprietary options. While open solutions attract more competition and innovation through small companies, proprietary solutions allow creation of large and powerful corporates, which may be in a stronger position, for example, to fund R&D, or take responsibility for the security of entire ecosystems. From a practical standpoint, big technology, media, internet and telecoms corporations tend to initially resist solutions, which would utilize full potential of opening of their technology standards, platforms and networks. This phenomenon has so far led to the formation of ‘legacy industries’, as opposed to their disruption through vertical integration. As a result, we can now see three distinct legacy industries: the big tech internet companies, telecoms and the telecom equipment vendors (see Fig. 16). It is possible to see clear dividing lines between those industries, but also scale economies which often tend to produce oligopolies in each of them. The dividing lines between different industries in the digital technology chain can also be also observed in Fig. 17. Market concentration in the globally concentrated big tech internet and in network technology vendor markets is naturally putting pressure on telecoms, which are often subject to regulations that vary region by region; in some regions they tend to be more pro-competitive than in others. However, we expect 5G to bring some changes to the established paradigm of internet tech, telecoms and the network tech vendor model, because: 30