Opera's Bid to Become an iPhone Browser

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Opera: No. 2 mobile browser, at 25.5%

The antitrust implications if Apple were to reject Opera's application are less clear. Regulators at the Justice Dept. or Federal Trade Commission may ask about the reasoning behind such a decision, says David Balto, a former policy director for the FTC and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank. "It would be the kind of thing the Justice Dept. and the FTC would want to look at," Balto says. FTC spokesman Mitchell Katz declined to comment, as did Justice Dept. spokeswoman Laura Sweeney.

Building an anticompetitive case wouldn't be easy, legal experts say. Regulators would have to prove that Apple has a monopoly in a market and that it's using that position to thwart competition. There's a slew of competition in smartphones and the iPhone isn't considered its own market. Customers with a strong preference for Opera's browser could find a version of it on other handsets; the company counts more than 50 million users of its mobile browsers and serves 25.5% of the mobile-browser market, according to data tracker StatCounter. Apple's browser leads the pack with 34.4% of the market. Nokia browsers make up 11.7%, while Research In Motion's BlackBerry has 10.1%.

Mobile devices also aren't held to the same legal standards as computers because they have more limited capabilities, says Michael Gartenberg, vice-president of strategy and analysis at tech research firm Interpret. "Phones are not desktops and I don't think you're going to see the same issues regarding browser choice on phones," he says.

Opera expects its application to get approved and hasn't made contingency plans in the event of rejection, says Opera spokesman Ted Miller. "There's really not much we can do," he says. "There's obviously a chance some regulatory bodies may get involved."

Google and Microsoft: disinterested?

Other browser makers may be encouraged by an acceptance. "As we've seen with Web browsers on the PC, choice leads to competition and innovation, and that's good for everybody," says Jay Sullivan, vice-president of mobile at Mozilla. Mozilla has not developed Firefox for Apple's handsets because "of constraints with the [operating system] environment and distribution," Sullivan says. The company is giving the iPhone some thought, Sullivan says.

Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya says of his company's Chrome browser: "We're really focused on the desktop." Sarah Keeling, a spokeswoman for Microsoft at Waggener Edstrom says Microsoft has no plans to create an Internet Explorer application for the iPhone.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Opera will use an unofficial, or "jailbroken" iPhone, to try to convince show-goers that its Opera Mini browser runs faster than Safari because it load Web pages with computing power from remote servers, rather than a phone's hardware. New features such as "speed dial"—a way to navigate quickly between favorite Web sites—will help Opera stand out to people who are accustomed to Apple's Safari, says Christen Krogh, Opera's chief development officer. "We are really genuine about this," Krogh says. "We are in the business of giving people access to the Web."

Douglas MacMillan is a staff writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek in New York.

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