Signal to Noise

In an article posted today at eWeek, AT&T is excused from its traditional role as scapegoat in the Google Voice rejection fiasco.  And my previously posted sentiments about Apple building something that competes with Google Voice have finally been echoed on a mainstream outlet.

Well doy, Apple realizes that consumer-empowering voice technology is a competitive advantage.  We VoIP folks have been preaching that gospel for the last ten years.  Comrade Ken Camp wrote with visionary accuracy about the merits of VoIP in his book IP Telephony Demystified, one of the really early books on the subject.  I agreed with him when I wrote Switching to VoIP that VoIP is a leveler of the playing field, a true equalizer and a legitimately revolutionary technology item.

I’ve also viewed carriers like AT&T, at least for the last four or five years, as access providers, not “phone line providers” offering dialtone.  Apple, it seems, has arrived at the same conclusion.

First, it’s not the FCC’s domain but the Federal Trade Commission’s domain whether or not a business practice, like Apple’s (admittedly inconsistent) enforcement of it’s own developer agreements, is an unfair trade practice. And it may well be unfair; that doesn’t make it within the jurisdiction of the FCC, whose stock and trade isn’t social progress or anti-collusion.  Clearly, those are business matters whose definition of justice has little or nothing to do with voice as an application.  We have to be careful not to push the social progress agenda too hard–especially to the extend that we’re routinely punishing those who are earning a great profit, vis-a-vis Apple and the iPhone.

Second, let’s ask the real question: Since we know the decision to allow Google Voice is ultimately up to Apple, and not AT&T, what could Apple’s motivation for this rejection possibly be?  Are we ignoring the simple answer?  Enhancements to the iChat ecosystems, perhaps? The most obvious answer may not satisfy the conspiracy theorists.  But something as easy as Apple is getting ready to release their own Voice-killer makes the most since to me, to heck with AT&T’s bandwidth.

Finally, I’ve almost concluded that AT&T’s days as the exclusive distributor of iPhones in North America are numbered. Apple would have to score a pretty low IQ to permanently marry their network support to a single carrier, with the rise of new wide-area wireless networking standards and mass WiFi addiction marching on with no favoritism towards Bell.  This would seem to indicate, at least out here in the “sensible” midwest, that Apple is not beholden to AT&T, a company short on both sexy intellectual property and an applications-oriented revenue model, for a short-term political favor that screws its relationship with Google, a company who is enriched of both.

The answer to this mystery, I believe, is in Cupertino.