Friday, 07 August, 2009 02:06

Age: 357 days

Is Google Voice a Threat to AT & T?

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Our story so far:

Chapter 1: Apple creates the iPhone.

Chapter 2: Apple opens the App Store, an online catalog of cheap or free programs that you can download straight to the phone. Programmers all over the world write 70,000 apps for it that perform every amazing feat you can name.

Chapter 3: One of them is Google Voice, a front end for Google's amazing free phone-management system. Among its many features: it lets you send free text messages and make 2-cent international calls, right from the iPhone.

Chapter 4: Apple mysteriously rejects this eminently useful app, refusing to list it in the App Store.

Then it goes even farther: it actually deletes from the App Store two similar programs called GV Mobile and Voice Central, which have been there for months. That is, Apple changes its mind retroactively - and won't give the developers any logical explanation.

Chapter 5: The blogosphere goes nuts. There's only one possible reason that Apple might delete these apps: because AT & T demanded it.

Why would AT & T care? Because of those free text messages and cheap international calls, of course. If these apps became popular, AT & T's revenue could take a serious hit.

This business has blown up in Apple/AT & T's face. The Federal Communications Commission, in fact, is now sniffing around, sending letters to Apple, AT & T and Google, clearly wondering if there's some illegal collusion going on. A few days later, Google's chief executive stepped down from Apple's board; tension is rising.

AT & T/Apple's logic doesn't even make sense. If the object is to prevent you from making cheap international calls, then they would also have to block Skype and all the other apps (already available) that let you do so. If it's to prevent you from sending free text messages, then they should also block FreeMMS and other apps that already do that.

It's almost as though AT & T/Apple never really cared while the apps in question stayed where they belonged-under the radar. But once big-shot Google got involved: well, we can't have that, can we?

In short, what Apple and AT & T have accomplished with their heavy-handed, Soviet information-control style is not to bury these useful apps. Instead, Apple/AT & T have elevated them to martyr status-and, in effect, thrown down a worldwide challenge to programmers everywhere.

"Get around THIS," they're saying.

But guess what? It won't take long. They've put a rock in the river, but the water will just find a way around it.

Already, Google says it is readying a replacement for the Google Voice app that will offer exactly the same features as the rejected app-except that it will take the form of a specialized, iPhone-shaped Web page. For all intents and purposes, it will behave exactly the same as the app would have; you can even install it as an icon on your Home screen.

What's Apple going to do now? Start blocking access to individual Web sites?

No question about it: the next chapter has yet to be written. But I think you're going to like it.

Source: By Pogue from http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/

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