[dsushant]

What are the implications for Free Zone users, Google, the carriers, advertisers, websites, and phone OEM’s?

1. Free Zone users can access their favorite Google communication tool (G+ / Gmail) and search. 2. Google gets to serve its ads on all these properties, apart from valuable usage data and improving its products (the more people search on Google, the better its results, etc). 3. Carriers have two obvious benefits – acquisition and/or retention of price sensitive users seeking free access to G+/Gmail/Google Search and acquiring users for data plans. Another benefit could be revenue sharing for lead generation via Google’s ads. The wild card with the carriers is to launch sponsored browsing as a product – where anyone could sponsor access to one/more web services. 4. Advertisers have a compelling incentive to allocate budgets for Google’s Ad Words product. 5. SEO wars will be taken to a new level. 6. The days of feature phones with no internet access could be numbered. In the optimistic (for Google) scenario, Free Zone will increase demand for low end internet enabled phones. And OEM’s will gleefully comply.

Note - Extracted from my blog: http://u2697.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/sponsored-browsing-and...