Picture the scene. You have just had a brilliant idea for a new business utilising the still hugely unexplored potential of mobile phones. It doesn't matter what the idea is. It could be anything from a multi-player quiz game to a treasure hunt making use of the fact that soon your phone will not only know who you are but also where you are.

With a bit of luck your idea could earn you some money and in the process create new jobs. And if enough people devise other wireless-based projects it could give birth to a new industry that could put Britain at the leading edge of an exploding technology.

The trouble is, as things stand at the moment, there is no way you can make any money out of it. Why? Because there is someone in the middle - your friendly telephone company (telco) - which is creaming off all the income. If your project involves the participants making a phone call then the telco collects the whole cost of the call. If it also involves sending out text messages to the caller then you could be caned for up to 10p a message (with discounts for bulk purchases).

In other words, from the start your project is doomed because you have to do all the work, put up all the money - and invest your intellectual property rights - while telcos such as BT and Vodafone collect all the income. Yet the phone calls wouldn't have been made in the first place if you hadn't invested you time and money in your idea. Something wrong, surely.

The telcos will argue that they had to invest in the capacity so why shouldn't they collect the money - especially at the moment when they are sagging under the costs, running into tens of billions of pounds, of bidding for radio spectrum for the third round of mobile phones. They have a point.

But the fact is that when they laid down all that capacity they hadn't a clue that text messaging would explode into one of the fastest growing industries of all time - with approaching a billion messages already being sent monthly in Britain. The same could be said of emailing years ago when that unexpectedly took off. And even if they had foreseen it they shouldn't be allowed to smother a nascent new industry at birth which could have given a vital boost to economic growth.

Things are starting to change but not nearly fast enough. If you are big and successful enough (and have the negotiating power to take your business elsewhere) then the telcos will reluctantly agree a revenue sharing agreement allowing you to keep a percentage (usually a very small one) of the cost of the telephone call. If you can combine that with buying cheap text messages in bulk then you might be able to defray the costs of the text messages but little else.

All this is extremely myopic on the part of the telcos. It is not the successful companies with bargaining power that are at risk but the small start-ups who haven't got any clout but whose businesses will wither on the vine unless the telcos move into the 21st century.

All they have to do is stop thinking like traditional telcos (ie squeezing as much money as they can out of the transmission capacity they dominate) and start thinking about encouraging new sources of growth in future.

If only they would think long-term they would realise that they stand to gain far more revenue in future from encouraging new industries that would not otherwise exist than they would from milking existing customers.

But asking a company like BT to change its spots is easier said than done. BT should look to Japan for inspiration. Over there, the giant telephone company NTT DoCoMo's i-mode revenue-sharing model for mobile applications is one of the reasons for its runaway success - and why so much "content" is being sold.

It is vital to do this otherwise the next stage of the information revolution (wireless, wireless, wireless) won't deliver the wealth-creating potential it is capable of. Telcos in the UK are desperately trying to turn their portals into fortresses behind which they can shelter their own content providers. But instead of amassing their own tied content providers they should be throwing their doors open to the new generation of developers. And if they don't then the regulators should separate their "common carrying" function from the provision of content.

This is a conflict of interest at the heart of the information revolution that must be resolved. It is the reason AOL has merged with Time-Warner - in order to build an electronic fortress in which the company owns the medium and the content (whether cable, satellite or wireless) that passes through it.

The trouble with the mainstream internet at the moment - as the continuing collapse of the consumer-based dot.coms daily re-affirms - is that no one has worked out a way of making an honest penny out of it without resorting to monopolisation. Mostly, this is good. The mutuality of the internet - whereby individuals and organisations freely exchange information - is this century's equivalent of one of the Wonders of the World.

But the "free-for-all" philosophy doesn't make a good business model. If entrepreneurs are to build successful businesses and employ more people then they must be able to see a revenue stream enabling them to make profits.

It is one of the central weaknesses of the business-to-consumer side of the internet that no one has yet worked out a universal formula for doing that. It would be tragic if we repeat the same mistake during the wireless revolution. But unless attitudes change quickly, we will, we will.