Skype pulls a Jobs
Skype asked the FCC for…something recently. Skype’s not a public company and their Website doesn’t have details. The FCC search engine’s had user-interface-dystrophy for more than 10 years and is no help.
Ars Technica has as good a summary as any. The FCC’s 1968 Carterfone decision. The Carterphone decision allowed us to attach devices of our choosing to the public switched telephone network, as long as such devices cause no damage. Skype wants the same principle applied to 3G wireless.
Much will be said, pro and con. Be prepared to hear how the Carterfone decision refers to “devices” and not to software. And that the PSTN of 1968, which was a regulated monopoly, is not like 3G, which relies on auctioned spectrum. I wager we will hear accusations that what Skype is proposing is an anti-capitalist insult to private property–that auctioned spectrum.
If the Skype side is smart, they’ll point out how the Carterfone decision was good, not bad for the economy, and they’ll try to quantify how much GDP we added by allowing competition to accelerate the adoption of cordless phones and answering machines. Maybe Skype will follow up by pointing out what would have happened if the meter was still running (think AOL, circa 1996) on Internet use. Think of the good it would do our economy if we hadn’t given cellular-spectrum licensees a choke-hold on the bandwidth.
But we did. I don’t know if it’s too late or not. Maybe we’d have to buy back the spectrum. I don’t actually think so. My opinion is we just have to make smarter decisions about the bandwidth that’s coming up for sale, and that will create competition that forces the cellular licensees to open up. But that’s a subject of another post.
My point, and I do have one, is that Skype is pulling a Steve Jobs here.
Remember a few weeks ago, when Steve told the RIAA it should stop insisting on DRM? Good PR move. Of course, anyone who was paying attention, policy-wise, immediately noted Jobs’ hypocrisy. Jobs was fresh from releasing an iPhone that has no SDK for independent developers, hiding this self-interested decision behind a lame excuse [link].
“These [iPhones] are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them…it has to be more of a controlled environment”.
Is Skype even any different? Unless you’re an asterisk hacker Skype doesn’t make it easy for users to make calls to Free World Dialup or Gizmo software–what TMCnet called the “great wall of VoIP”. It’s not really rocket science. Anybody really use that SIP-to-Skype gateway, though? For the highly technically able only, I suspect.
Bottom line, what goes around comes around. And what goes around is narrow self-interest. And if that’s all that ever goes around, that’s all that’s ever going to come around. Skype–and Jobs–might be right on the ideal. Bring it down to earth, and the policies they propose are no less selfish and petty than those they criticize.
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