One of my favorite bloggers in the mobile area is Russell Beattie, formerly of Yahoo’s mobile team among other endeavors and currently creator of Mowser, a mobile search engine/portal/transcoder.

Russell doesn’t suffer (particularly mobile) fools gladly, so he’s a good counterpoint to most conventional wisdom in the Web/mobile areas.

Today, his rant holds special import for service providers, as he lays out Google’s real path to success in the Web search market — and its plans to follow that blueprint in the mobile market.

Beattie seems at least in part inspired by Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations, who at the Mobile World Congress this week implied service provider contracts are becoming less important, as mobile users increasingly wanted to browse beyond an operator’s own site:

“The world is changing. Users want an internet without fences. They know how to type in Google.com if they want to get to it. Two years ago the operators were still playing the role of gate­keepers but that is no longer the role for them.”

The idea that Google’s search growth happens serendipitously, either on the Web or on mobile phones, leads Beattie to lay it out plainly:

The greatest hoax ever played on the Internet is the idea that Google’s growth was somehow “natural” or “viral”, and that the strength of their search results alone is what propelled them to their insane 70% market share…. Google bought as much search space as they could from OEMs, portals, etc…the reason that Mozilla.org is a going concern and Opera is now free? Because of the search deals they made with Google.

For carriers, the other party in some of those search deals, this is nothing new. But Beattie follows the thread into the mobile area:

They’re doing it again in mobile, and no one seems to be noticing. The first thing I thought of when I read that Google is getting 50x more search traffic from the iPhone than any other phone is “Wow, that default iPhone search deal they made with Apple is really paying off.” Of course all the fanboys don’t bother noticing that and just assume somehow Google would be getting all that search traffic “naturally”. Google might still be seeing a huge percentage more iPhone traffic because of how nice the iPhone interface is than the rest (it is the best mobile browsing experience bar none) but that’s not the significant part. You don’t see Yahoo! or Microsoft or Ask making the same claims, do you? Google’s getting that huge increase in search traffic because they *paid* for it.

So while Google’s hard-ball 700 Mhz open access demands and its still-evolving Android strategy look like they’ll succeed in helping to “open” up the Web, don’t miss its deals that essentially “lock down” large portion of the search market — Web and now mobile — for itself.

Look no further than this week for more proof it its pay-for-play strategy in action as it managed to get the Google search engine embedded as part of Nokia’s search application.

For mobile operators, this means one thing (if it wasn’t already obvious). You have something Google — not to mention Microsoft and Yahoo, or Microsoft/Yahoo) — need, and need desperately.

Don’t get so distracted by the man screaming “OPEN!” behind the curtain that you give away the prize he is really looking for, prime mobile portal and search engine placement.

Be it large upfront fees or good terms on an ad share deal — make them pay.

UPDATED: Here’s some good additional info from Chris Sacca, who used to manage Google’s wireless business (ie–strategy and lobbying) but left recently to go the VC route. Sacca notes that browsing by searching on the iPhone is probably quicker than desktop-style URL entering given a) the hard-to-use iPhone keyboard interface and b) Google query box built into the iPhone “chrome.”