NOTE: The following is from my free weekly e-mail newsletter.

I have recently begun working with Egoscout, a company dedicated to teaching people how to get more from their cell phones, giving them bargains on data services, helping them upgrade, and helping those in the cellular data business find their market. (The slogan is, "turn the cell phone into a sell phone." Cute, huh?)

I actually conceived of this business during the recent CTIA show in Atlanta, test-marketing the concept with exhibitors and attendees, drawing an enthusiastic reception. Our CEO is Jeff Vick, a serial entrepreneur with experience at Turner and iXL.

The dark lords of the CTIA show were the executives of Verizon Wireless (left, from their home page), who strutted about the event in black suits, arrogantly aserting that they would, could, and should control all data markets on their network. You can't sell data services (like ringtones) to a Verizon customer except through Verizon. All programs must be rewritten, to Verizon's specifications, in Qualcomm's Brew, and before they are marketed they must be approved by Verizon Wireless executives.

Consumers don't know this. They generally don't care. There is no reason why they should, since data represents barely 2% of the total cellular market.

But this is going to change. So-called 3G networks will, along with compression, give cellular networks something resembling broadband capacity very soon. And nVidia chip sets, revealed at this CTIA show, will give phones themselves the kind of graphics capability previously found only in full PCs, by next year, at popular prices.

What's coming is an explosion in cellular data, an explosion which Verizon is standing in the way of. They announced what they called "Mobile Web 2.0" recently but it is in fact a proprietary offering. It's like calling AOL the Internet.

This means that customers are being trapped inside a walled garden of Verizon Wireless's making. It also means that vendors will be unable to advertise their wares broadly, because even if all the other U.S. cellular providers go with open standards, one-third of their ad buys will be wasted on Verizon customers who can't access what they're being sold.

This is why Asia and Europe are so far ahead of the U.S. in the cellular data market. Standards are uniform, Premium SMS billing lets you sell across platforms, so you can advertise ringtones in a magazine, or on TV, and not waste a dollar. At CTIA the recording industry was pushing "true" Ringtones, MP3 snippets taken directly off popular recordings, but so far only Cingular has begun advertising them, thanks to the Verizon roadblock.

You can't expect a carrier to effectively sell complex data services. ISPs don't sell Google or Amazon. They sell bits, they sell access. The services need a way to sell themselves, and they must be reached by their entire market, if you're to get anything resembling the Internet data market in a cellular world.

You're going to read a lot more from me on this in the coming months. It's a very important issue. At some point Verizon, like AOL, will realize it must open up to the mobile Internet. But it won't do that until it feels pressured to do so, until the market starts imposing a price on their intransigence. My goal, as a reporter, is to increase that pressure, and perhaps cause them to pay that price some months or weeks before they would have otherwise.

I hope you'll join me, for your own sake. Don't buy Verizon Wireless cellular services in the U.S. Find another carrier. And tell your friends that, if they want cellular data services, they need to avoid Verizon like the plague.

The sooner we get Verizon Wireless behind open standards, the sooner the mobile Internet market opportunity becomes real.