I read these comments from Mark Curtis t'other day: "Make no mistake; the operators will be seeking to get the data element of the Apple tax back. And guess who from? Yes, the small army of content and service providers trying extremely hard to create a mobile data industry." Now, Marks' company Flirtomatic are an old client of ours... so maybe I should just talk to him rather than blogging aimlessly about this, but hey it's Sunday and I think he'd rather spend the weekend with his family than hearing me drone at him. I'm wondering whether this is actually all that much of a departure for O2; when they introduced I-Mode they threatened to shake up the ol' UK content ecosystem with a 86/14 revenue share in favour of content providers, which makes it look as though in principle they're comfortable taking a small cut of data revenues: call it 15%. So between 10 and 40% of revenues go to Apple, say it's near the upper end of that and it's 35%; O2 are happy taking 15% for themselves as per I-mode, this still leaves the now-traditional 50% of revenues going to content providers - so no change for them. And O2 get to avoid a bit of risk by not subsidising iPhones - if customers buying them don't use data services, O2 aren't out of pocket. I'm not saying this 50% is necessarily reasonable, just that it's not much of a change from the status quo.