Most of the world’s largest operators are considering their future relationship with the major US hyperscalers and seeking to leverage various assets, such as the potential edge compute/5G combination, to strike an improved balance of power. Telefónica is reported to be in talks with Amazon AWS, Google and Microsoft to support a platform for marketing application programming interfaces (APIs). Open APIs will be foundational to future connected software platforms and will underpin immersive, joined-up experiences such as the metaverse. But operators’ success with their own API platforms – whether single-company or cross-carrier efforts such as the ill-fated Wholesale Application Community (WAC) of 2012 – has been very limited, especially compared to the huge power of apps platforms and ecosystems linked…