Apple lied to public about Google Voice app rejection

http://mashable.com/2009/09/18/google-apple-fcc/

by mcantelon • 17 years ago

117 42 17 years ago

th0ma5• 17 years ago

ars has more with some follow up from apple... this seems to be some in-the-middle hand wringing... they haven't "rejected" it, but they haven't approved it, either... http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/fcc-releases...

mcantelon2• 17 years ago

A fairly transparent attempt to cover their ass, methinks.

pyre3• 17 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Another possibility is that this was some decision that someone made at Apple without Steve Jobs' 'permission' or 'guidance' while he was on leave and this new response is Steve trying to reverse what he thinks is a bad decision without making look like the company: (1) 100% relies on him for its success (i.e. without him they would fall apart) and/or (2) doesn't know what the hell it's doing.

GHFigs2• 17 years ago

Cover their ass from what? They repeated exactly what they said before.

idm4• 17 years ago

On the one hand, I feel like Apple can probably hide behind the terms of its app store and be sufficiently safe from any consequences. In the short term.

Especially given the "duplicating dialer functionality" argument, this sounds a lot like AT&T has something to do with the rejection, even though Apple and AT&T adamantly deny that.

So, for the slightly-less-short-term, it sounds like Apple has an (anti-)competition issue here... and if the FCC doesn't care about it (and they might) then the FTC surely will. After all, isn't "duplicate functionality" just a secret code for "competing with our features?"

tptacek5• 17 years ago

Uh, no. Being arbitrary and protective about what products you allow people to build onto your own products is not inherently a restraint of trade.

My cable set-top box is a Cisco product. There are lots of cool things I could do with it. It controls a critical communications channel for me. I can't even swap it out for a different component. Clearly the FTC does not care that Cisco and AT&T have colluded to prevent me from modifying it.

When someone can convince the DoJ that Apple has seized control of the phone market, so that no viable alternatives exist to bring connected mobile software to market, Apple will be in a position to violate the law by capriciously denying applications. They're not there yet.

People want to develop for the iPhone because it's the best, most popular platform. They don't have to.

idm4• 17 years ago

Since you mention it, the FCC just might call _you_ the criminal if you tried to modify your cisco box... :)

I won't claim to understand what's cooking in the DoJ or the FTC, but from my armchair, it seems like there's at least an argument here.

I wonder if this has come up before with different platforms, where a competitor was denied access to the platform basically because they were a competitor.

I can imagine this being the case with highly regulated industries (e.g. the TV/cable example), where the government is basically the gatekeeper of new competition, but here (i.e. Google Voice) it's not an issue of regulation.

jhancock7• 17 years ago

You and idm both make good arguments, they don't seem exactly the same. Both are reasonable. I'll throw in a third. Although "Being arbitrary and protective about what products you allow people to build onto your own products is not inherently a restraint of trade", perhaps some forms of it should be. Do we have to wait for a form of monopoly control that fits the DoJ's intervention before we fix things that may obviously be broken? DMCA protections aside, maybe its time our gov does take a stand on companies precluding us from doing what we want with something after we purchase it.

Your set-top box perhaps only should be protected if modifying it could cause serious harm to the core service provided, a service that is supposed to be neutral in what it carries. That narrow protection (if it even applies to your set-top box) should most certainly not apply to value-added user apps on a pocket computer.

If a role of government is to ensure economic growth, is it wise to use Apply as the foothold case to create rules to disallow this level of protectionism? Would the PC market have created the level of economic growth it did if IBM had controlled what software could be installed? Is it acceptable in terms of economic potential that simply because companies have the means to control such distribution now that they be allowed to?

wheels• 17 years ago

> It controls a critical communications channel for me.

I believe the critical difference, insofar as the FCC is concerned, is that the cellular telephone spectrum is a public resource and as such they can impose certain restrictions on the companies to whom they partitions slices of that public resource that fall outside of the normal bounds of anti-competition law.

I don't believe that cable is regulated the same way.

Confusion• 17 years ago

Clearly the FTC does not care that Cisco and AT&T have colluded to prevent me from modifying it.

How do you figure they 'clearly' don't care? Isn't it just that nobody is making enough of a fuss about it for them to do anything about it?

josefresco• 17 years ago

"Uh, no. Being arbitrary and protective about what products you allow people to build onto your own products is not inherently a restraint of trade."

I think Microsoft would have a different opinion about that given their experience with the government in the 1990's and still to this day about what they allow and pre-install on THEIR own OS.

kogir• 17 years ago

The Google Voice app in no way affects AT&T. Even with Google Voice, cell phone minutes and data are still used. SMS revenue is potentially at risk, but PNS is a bigger threat to that than Google Voice.

Apple is very likely acting alone. Have I missed something?

idm4• 17 years ago

It's not a question of how much AT&T has to lose, it's a question of what Apple has to gain.

Here, yes, AT&T has something to lose if the app is allowed. Maybe it's not much, but it's something.

What does Apple have to gain by denying this app? In fact, they're the _only_ ones who have anything at all to lose by taking such action.

EDIT: good points in reply to this... (I can't reply any deeper in the thread, so I'll just acknowledge it here)

TomOfTTB2• 17 years ago

I hate what Apple is doing with their app store. But the fact that the FCC or the FTC would even be involved in this is ridiculous. At least under their current mandate which is to prevent large scale market abuse.

AT&T has sold 10.4 million iPhones as of 2Q 2009 (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/07/att-activated-24-m...). Compare that to 271 million Mobile Phones in use right now in the U.S. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...). That's a little over 3% market share.

So Apple isn't big enough to have an impact on the larger market which makes the government attacking them unjustified. They just gets a lot of hype which makes them a ripe target for an overzealous FCC.

idm4• 17 years ago

I promise I'm not gunning for any legal action here (cause I get so much done w/ my Apple tools) but...

http://gizmodo.com/5240272/federal-trade-commission-investig...

FTA: "The biggest issue here seems to be that Apple and Google share two directors, in this case Eric E. Schmidt and Arthur Levinson."

Basically, I don't claim to know why this stuff happens, or why X investigates Y... and you know what? Maybe you're right that it _would_ be ridiculous.

EDIT: (posted in reply to TomOfTTB, below) I completely agree that it's a separate issue from the GV product. I mention it because there was recent discussion of the FTC, Apple, and Google.

jsz02• 17 years ago

I still think Apple is trying to build a more favorable deal with Google. From Apple's perspective they have the most widely used mobile web device in terms of actual usage. Nokia, RIM, etc sell more units but the iPhone dominates mobile usage. Google is already the default search & map provider for the iPhone delivering tens of millions of users and probably hundreds of millions of ad views to Google. Perhaps Google Voice could be a default also? What if Apple were willing to either build the functionality into the core software or simply pre-install the GV app on every iPhone? Maybe Apple feels like they are becoming the real mobile gateway to the Internet and might deserve a bigger slice of Google's pie? I'm not endorsing this theory as good business but it makes a lot of sense to me.

dandelany• 17 years ago

So much of the commentary surrounding this contoversy is analogies & thought experiments, presumably because there's not a lot of precedent for cases exactly like this.

So here's mine - Imagine that, next week, Apple releases a new service called iVoice that all but duplicates the functionality of Google Voice. Transcribes voicemail & e-mails it, provides a full web interface (probably integrated with MobileMe), and obviously integrates seamlessly into a new iPhone OS update. If this happened, would it be a significantly different issue than Windows packaging IE with an install, but not Netscape? Can you imagine the hell that would break loose if Windows decided to become an IE-only platform?

I suppose the big difference is that they make the hardware too - but there's no way Dell could get away with making a hardware modification that prevented you from installing certain software. Does Apple really get to make all the rules here?

jsz02• 17 years ago

Apple is not even close to a monopoly in cell phone hardware so there is quite a significant difference. There are many other alternatives to the iPhone. Apple rejecting Google Voice doesn't preclude anyone from getting an Android phone or BlackBerry instead. As long as that healthy competition exists Apple has nothing to worry about. If they were to build a monopoly in cell phone hardware they would have to drastically change their business practices or face the US DOJ and EU.

GHFigs2• 17 years ago

Can someone point out the lie? This seems in line with Apple's prior statements to me.

Yes, there is a difference between Apple saying they're still considering it and Google saying they rejected it--but that's expected, given that Google has no idea what is going on inside Apple. I don't see how that constitutes a lie. From Google's perspective, it has been rejected, but I see no claim that that rejection was said to be permanent and inclusive of all possible implementations of Google Voice for the iPhone (which is the real issue). Hence, from Apple's perspective, it's still an open question.

It seems like people have chosen this one application to assume that all rejections are permanent, even though there are hundreds if not thousands of examples in the App Store of applications that were initially rejected for one reason or another, and later approved with or without modification.

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

Apple lies more than I did when I was in college and had two girlfriends. When they say one thing I've started betting the other way. When they said Jobs was fine, despite looking like Skeletor in a black mock turtleneck, I bought some puts. That worked well. If only I had known about it the first time they covered up his trying to cure cancer by eating more carrots, or when they said "no we're not making a phone".

Apple lied to public about Google Voice app rejection

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