Twitter’s director of mobile: AT&T has guts

One of the themes this afternoon at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2010 conference was “Who owns the user?” — the assumption being that mobile carriers have given up the control over the user’s experience and data they once had.

It would have been a great opportunity to pile-on criticism of mobile carriers, but a couple of speakers, including Twitter mobile head Kevin Thau (pictured center), had favorable things to say. Asked by moderator Brad Stone of The New York Times which carrier has done the best job handling the dramatic increase in data usage, Thau praised AT&T’s decision to carry the iPhone exclusively in the US.

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“Everyone likes to say that their service is inadequate, but you have to admire the guts that it took to make that decision,” Thau said. (Note that he didn’t praise AT&T’s actual service.)

He added that he’s also impressed with how Verizon has handled the Android, preventing the iPhone from completely dominating the marketplace. In fact, he said the smartest thing Google did in promoting Android was “giving Verizon a big hug and getting behind their distribution.” That’s partly why Thau said it would be “very, very hard” for other device-makers to replicate Apple’s success selling phones directly, rather than through carriers.

Asokan Thiyagarajan (pictured left), Samsung’s director of platforms and technology strategy, gave a similar answer to Stone’s question.

“All the operators have really handled it very well,” he said, adding that they have all been “very open.”

Both those speakers had some incentive to be nice, since they work with carriers — Samsung more extensively, but Twitter announced a partnership with Japanese carrier Softbank in May. Thau acknowledged this, saying his remarks could be seen as “political.”