O’Brien’s best hope is a high-profile debate, not a victory

Denis O'Brien has long held a grudge against web companies for allegedly hitching a free ride on the networks of telco operators such as his Digicel, generating enormous revenues on the back of web browsing by telco customers.

Digicel has shelled out $1.5 billion in recent years to improve its network, his argument goes, and then the likes of Google and Facebook come in and sell ads on the back of the network usage and don't share it with anybody.

Remember his rather colourful comments in March about Facebook? O’Brien said it is the company that “comes to your party and drinks your champagne and kisses your girls and doesn’t bring anything”. It was quoted all over the world.

O'Brien last year also had a related, though slightly different, spat with web telephony company Viber, which Digicel sought to block on its network unless it got a slice of its revenue.

On that occasion it was Viber that hit the publicity zinger, musing that O’Brien was “on the wrong side of history”. He wasn’t impressed.

O’Brien is well used to getting into scraps. But even he must accept that he is unlikely to have success in bringing some of the biggest companies in the world to heel on his own.

He wants the web companies to share their revenues with him. What is his leverage?

Digicel has already started to block the web giants’ ads on its network in Jamaica, and is working with Israeli outfit Shine to do so in all of Digicel’s 31 markets.

Digicel is the market leader across most of the Caribbean, so it will no doubt irk Facebook, Google and the rest if its ads sold in the region are effectively valueless on the biggest network. But they can cope.

Mr O’Brien’s best hope is that he starts a high-profile industry debate that eventually sucks in the world’s biggest telcos.

The web giants cannot live without those.