The technology executives and analysts here in Barcelona this week are trying to figure out how take all the content found on the Web and migrate it to your mobile device.

The mobile phone network operators like to charge for content. One executive, who didn't want to be quoted, told CNN this creates a "closed garden" of content that is controlled by your mobile operator and is dependent on what deals the operator has with a select group of content providers.

I'm pretty sure this will fail. That was the lesson of AOL. Remember all those ads that said "Go to AOL keyword [blah]?" AOL tried to be both an ISP and a rich content provider. Their product was access to a wide range of content, presumably styled and vetted by AOL for "safeness" and accuracy, all in a single easy to access place. This wasn't a bad deal in the mid 90s, when free websites with quality content supported by advertising didn't really exist in large numbers. And even the few sites that did exist were difficult to find because search engines sucked so much. I distinctly remember having to explain to people in 1996 that AOL was not the Internet.

So what happened? Things matured. Why spend $20 a month and go to AOL keyword "WebMD" when I can spend $10 a month and go to www.webmd.com. Why visit AOL's software library when I have download.com? Even if everyone at AOL was in the business of generating content for AOL, there was still an several orders of magnitude more people generating content for the web. Suddenly there were hundreds of gates into the theme park that was the Internet, and nobody wanted to wait in line at the most expensive gate.

What about mobile phone providers? They are just gates onto a data network. They are trying to provide content their users want, and charge for it. However, they can never provide all the types of content their users want. This is a classic Long Tail issue. You are targeting mobile content at kids. But why? What about the millions of housewives? Coupons, sales, what about recipes? Take a picture of a barcode, and a website tells you meal ideas involving that item. There is definitely something there.

This "mobile ISPs providing content" plan will fail as soon as one mobile provider decides to focus on leveraging the content of the entire Internet. If companyA provides the fastest possible access to existing content, put money in caching proxies and into software gateways that automatically reformat HTML to fit a mobile screen they would win. Mobile providers need to embrace their role as "provider of the tubes" and make their money on charging for packets, not trying to decide what I want those packets to contain.

Social networking goes mobile