Editorial: Apple, the FCC, and the sideloading solution

As Engadget’s resident former attorney, my first instinct when I sat down to re-read Apple, AT&T’s and Google’s FCC filings regarding Google Voice was to put on my lawyer hat and try to find inconsistencies that might shed some additional light on what had actually happened — if Apple’s account differed from AT&T’s, for example, perhaps those subtle differences would reveal the actual truth. This proved to be much more difficult than I had imagined, however: not only had Google redacted the most interesting part of its statement, I came to a profound realization after just a few moments of work.

I don’t care.

Each of the responses was long, dense, and polished to a high-gloss shine that made each company’s actions seem not only rational and justified, but almost inevitable in a way — as I wrote at the time, Apple isn’t exaggerating when it says that these are entirely new problems, and simply reading the individual letters paints a fairly sympathetic picture of how this whole chaotic process ended up in such disarray. But that’s a perspective that assumes deeply-rooted interest in the systems and procedure of the App Store, a perspective that assumes there’s a good reason we should be looking to lawyers and government regulators to figure out what’s going on with the most exciting and vital software market that we’ve seen in a long time.

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Editorial: Apple, the FCC, and the sideloading solution originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This post is tagged: App store, app store approval process, AppStore, AppStoreApprovalProcess, AT&T, column, columns, Editorial, fcc, features, Google Voice, GoogleVoice