“If you can’t beat ‘em, tell the government to force ‘em to let you beat ‘em,” Mike Beasley reports for 9to5Mac. “That’s the approach BlackBerry CEO John Chen wants to take to mobile software development.”
“Today Chen wrote in a blog post on the BlackBerry website that he believes the issue of net neutrality requires the government to not only promote and protect neutrality not only among wireless and broadband carriers, but also among app and content providers,” Beasley reports. “To put Chen’s points in simpler terms, he’s angry that services like Netflix and iMessage are not available for BlackBerry devices and says that the government should require the companies responsible for those services (and others like them) to stop ‘discriminating’ against BlackBerry.”
Read more in the full article here.
An excerpt from Chen’s blog post:
Defining Net Neutrality. There is widespread disagreement in defining the term “net neutrality.” Most discussion has focused on telecommunications carriers and how they operate and manage their physical networks. Neutrality advocates want to prohibit carriers from creating paid, prioritized “fast lanes,” and from slowing down or “throttling” customers using excessive bandwidth. Neutrality advocates argue that such practices will destroy the free and open internet, while the carriers argue such prohibitions will destroy their incentives to invest in infrastructure to carry more traffic.
BlackBerry believes policymakers should focus on more than just the carriers, who play only one role in the overall broadband internet ecosystem. The carriers are like the railways of the last century, building the tracks to carry traffic to all points throughout the country. But the railway cars travelling on those tracks are, in today’s internet world, controlled not by the carriers but by content and applications providers. Therefore, if we are truly to have an open internet, policymakers should demand openness not just at the traffic/transport layer, but also at the content/applications layer of the ecosystem. Banning carriers from discriminating but allowing content and applications providers to continue doing so will solve nothing.
Therefore, any net neutrality legislation must take a holistic view of the entire playing field, addressing both carrier neutrality and content/application neutrality… Unfortunately, not all content and applications providers have embraced openness and neutrality. Unlike BlackBerry, which allows iPhone users to download and use our BBM service, Apple does not allow BlackBerry or Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging service. Netflix, which has forcefully advocated for 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. This dynamic has created a two-tiered wireless broadband ecosystem, in which iPhone and Android users are able to access far more content and applications than customers using devices running other operating systems. These are precisely the sort of discriminatory practices that neutrality advocates have criticized at the carrier level.
MacDailyNews Take: A few points:
1. Chen is batshit insane. Or he fell and hit hit head. Seek medical/mental health attention immediately, John.
2. Nobody makes apps for BlackBerry because fscking BlackBerry is DEAD.
2a. Following Chen’s “logic,” the gov’t should force Apple to make apps for Tizen and every other half-assed failed OS on the market. Chen’s ever-rising level desperation seems to have caused irreparable cognitive damage.
3. We told you years ago that so-called “net neutrality” would become a bastardized fiasco.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]