Over at ArsTechnica, they report (with glee) the outburst of one David Birch at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona. Birch asks the questions the whole world should be asking, both inside and outside the Telecoms industry:

"Why are you such a bunch of big girls?" asked Birch. "Why don't you tell the content owners to just get stuffed?" He continued unabated: "You're too seduced by the content industry, Hollywood is not even a $10 billion industry. Hollywood is small compared to the telecom industry. Why don't you take a stronger line? Consumers don't want DRM at all. You can't sell DRM."

The article goes on to compare the cost of a chip fab to the cost of a medium-priced, Brokeback-Mountain-esque movie (think: 340 to 1). If shoving DRM down consumer’s throats is such a pain in the ass for content providers and consumers, then why not just create your own content industry?

Gross over-simplification? Yes. Recipe for disaster? Maybe. But it’s still baffling that hairy behemoths like IBM and Google are so willing to alienate their customers for the sake of pleasing these backwards-looking, dwindling relics of a bygone era.