August 24, 2009, 9:11 PM — Your faithful blogger has been studiously ignoring this month's slow-mo kerfuffle over Apple's failure to approve the Google Voice app for the App Store. This is because I'm becoming bored with App Store kerfuffles generally, as it continues to strike me as a very insular debate within a narrow community, albeit one loudly represented in the tech press and blogosphere. In a nutshell (illustrated by various posts from Jon Gruber, who has been following it rather closely), the official Google-approved app that used Google's voice over IP service, was rejected from the App Store; first Gruber's sources told him that AT&T made this call, but then Apple told the FCC that the decision was theirs alone. (Gruber also explains how he and his source made the initial mistake, in an interesting game of Telephone.) Problem solved, right? Well, except for the BBC trumpeting the fact that AT&T is also sort of claiming credit for the move.
As it happened, I was reading an item in the New Yorker's Talk of the Town column this morning about false confessions, which are more common than you might think. Generally, the way that these confessions come out is that the innocent individual is made to believe that not confessing will result in a fate even worse than the false confession; in the case discussed in the New Yorker item, four men whose connection to a murder was circumstantial at best were convinced by police that they would be successfully prosecuted and sentenced to death unless they pled guilty to the crime they didn't commit. So what would lead AT&T to, when pressed by the FTC, say essentially that they had put Apple up to it -- "AT&T and Apple agreed that Apple would not take affirmative steps to enable an iPhone to use AT&T's wireless service (including 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi) to make VoIP calls without first obtaining AT&T's consent" -- even though Apple is willing to take the heat?
Well, what about power? There's a lot of speculation about the power dynamic in the Apple-AT&T iPhone relationship, with most people admitting that Apple holds the upper hand. Perhaps AT&T wants to sort of imply, to the insiders following this thing, that it can put the smack down on Apple when it feels the need. It might sound kind of jerky to normal people, but as noted normal people are very much not following this story.
UPDATE: There are some definite goofs on my part in this post, discussed here.
Follow Josh on Google+
