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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.
Does that include fart apps? Or should developers just be required to port the "super" ones?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/09/29/1842252/rim-doesnt-want-200-fart-apps
Rot in hell you has-beens :) You had your chance and you fucked up. This is what you get for inflicting the shit-pile that was BES on admins, then having the gall to charge out the ass for it on top of premium phone plans.
Not going to lie. When got rid of the of the last BB phone we officespaced the /fuck/ out of that remaining BES server.
I would argue that there should be some sort of regulation that ensures that phones are interoperable with one another for "phone stuff". That is, if you sell a phone in this country, by law it should be able to make a phone call to every other phone sold in the country. The problem is, what qualifies as "phone stuff" is rapidly expanding.
iMessage is a good example. Apple is trying to leverage its dominant market position to make text messaging something that's iPhone only. Remember the whole debacle with people who had an iPhone and then didn't suddenly not being able to receive text messages from other people who still had iPhones. Apple's solution was broken and only partially effective - and I think at least somewhat intentionally so. Same with FaceTime. You want to talk to your friends with an iPhone? Well, you need an iPhone too!
So yeah, we as a society need to decide what we define as "phone stuff". Having the ability to communicate with every other phone for "phone stuff" is critical from an economic perspective, and eventually will also be so from a safety perspective. Requiring inter-phone communications to be standardized isn't too far-fetched of an idea.
(Requiring the same non-phone-stuff apps to work on different platforms though is stupid.)
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
No one wants to switch from a Mac/Windows to a Windows/Mac system if their files or programs are not 100% guaranteed to work.
When my vintage Black MacBook (2006) died last year after eight years of faithful service, I exported my data into neutral file formats (i.e., cvs and xml), switched over to my Windows gaming machine, and imported my data into corresponding programs. Minimal downtime. Meanwhile, I'm saving up for a new Mac system.
In defense of Netflix, they support playing videos over HTML5 (with DRM extenstions of course). So if Blackberry would update their browser to support HTML5 with DRM, then blackberry users could watch Netflix on their devices.
You talk like Firefox could implement it, which they can't. They need keys, those keys need to stay secret and the content needs to stay protected until you can hand it over to the OS/graphics driver and probably all sorts of other nasty liabilities and penalties if you don't. The music industry had to abandon DRM, but the movie industry is still going full steam with HDCP 2.2 for 4K and when they finally make 4K BluRay this year it'll be choking full of AACS 2.0, BD+ 2.0, Cinavia 2.0 and whatever else they can throw at it.
I think they know this is their really last chance, BluRay looks pretty damn good (1080p, uncompressed sound) and 4K BluRay adds all the last bells and whistles like resolution on par with DCI 4K, high frame rate, 10 bit color, extremely wide color space Rec.2020, bigger dynamic range ,>HDTV 3D even if you only get half per eye, HEVC encoding... if you can rip one of those discs the source is likely to be better than anything you can play it with, so far there's not even a reference monitor at any price that can deliver 100% Rec.2020 coverage.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
200+ replies and nobody seems to understand net neutrality well enough to pin down why his argument is wrong, besides some nebulous arm-waving about it being impractical. What he's saying is actually not that illogical. If the government is going to mandate that network traffic must not be discriminated against based on source, why not mandate that app development not discriminate based on platform?
Where the argument falls apart is in market interference. The ISP market in the U.S. has been grossly interfered with by government - local governments have awarded monopoly contracts to certain ISPs, making them in many cases the sole provider of high-speed internet. Consequently further government interference is needed to insure these ISPs don't abuse their monopoly position by degrading network traffic based on source. That's the jist of net neutrality. If you had lots of competing ISPs, then there would be no need for net neutrality because any company deliberately degrading Netflix would have customers canceling the next day to switch to another ISP. But since the government has artificially limited the number of ISPs and people can't switch, you need net neutrality to prevent that type of monopoly abuse.
There has been no such government interference in the software platform market. Aside from the phones of government employees (which are probably biased in favor of Blackberry anyway compared to the general population), there is no government interference limiting people's choice of which phones to get. Consequently there is no need to mandate that software development be platform-neutral.