Blackberry CEO: Net Neutrality Means Mandating Cross-Platform Apps

DW100 writes In a bizarre public blog post the CEO of BlackBerry, John Chen, has claimed that net neutrality laws should include forcing app developers to make their services available on all operating systems. Chen even goes as far as citing Apple's iMessage tool as a service that should be made available for BlackBerry, because at present the lack of an iMessage BlackBerry app is holding the firm back. Some excerpts from Chen's plea: Netflix, which has forcefully advocated carrier neutrality, has discriminated against BlackBerry customers by refusing to make its streaming movie service available to them. Many other applications providers similarly offer service only to iPhone and Android users. ... Neutrality must be mandated at the application and content layer if we truly want a free, open and non-discriminatory internet. All wireless broadband customers must have the ability to access any lawful applications and content they choose, and applications/content providers must be prohibited from discriminating based on the customer’s mobile operating system. Since "content providers" are writing code they think makes sense for one reason or another (expected returns financial or psychic), a mandate to write more code seems like a good way to re-learn why contract law frowns on specific performance.

Comments

Re:Bye_bye, Blackberry

[__aaclcg7560]

Try Minesweeper Deluxe for Mac.

XMPP isn't the best, worse than competitors

[raymorris]

They didn't spend xx million dollars developing a new protocol and software for both server-side and client-side to replace their already existing Talk because Talk was working great already. They made that investment in order to have a better service.

> how is being the only one using XMPP worse

The key words there are "being the only one". You don't get interoperability by being the only one using the "standard". Instead, they were the only major player hurt by the limitations of XMPP. For example, XMPP is designed around a reasonably consistent network connection and fairly stable IP, while mobile phone IPs might change several times in five minutes. Synchronization of audio and video isn't great, etc.

XMPP would have had the advantage of interoperability IF other major providers used it. Since the other major providers did not use XMPP, there was no interoperability advantage and therefore no convincing reason to stay with it, other than the money and time it would take to develop something new and switch.

Re:Bye_bye, Blackberry

[Whatanut]

Just to nitpick... BBM for Android and iPhone do exist.

Re:Bye_bye, Blackberry

[fgodfrey]

Assuming you weren't kidding.... The original MacBook (not the MacBook Pro, which has always been silver) and several follow on models were available in both white and black. See the Wikipedia picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...