Is Google Voice a threat to AT&T

Chapter 1: Apple creates the iPhone. Chapter 2: Apple opens the App Store, an online catalogue of cheap or free programs that you can download straight to the phone. Programmers all over the world write 70,000 apps for it that perform every amazing feat you can name. Chapter 3: One of them is Google Voice, a front end for Googles amazing free phonemanagement system (http:// bit.ly/ZPgVv). Among its many features: it lets you send free text messages and make 2-cent international calls, right from the iPhone. Chapter 4: Apple mysteriously rejects this eminently useful app, refusing to list it in the App Store. Then it goes even farther: it actually deletes from the App Store two similar programs called GV Mobile and Voice Central, which have been there for months. That is, Apple changes its mind retroactively and wont give the developers any logical explanation (http:// bit.ly/vdbMq). Chapter 5: The blogosphere goes nuts. Theres only one possible reason that Apple might delete these apps: because AT&T demanded it. Why would AT&T care Because of those free text messages and cheap international calls, of course. If these apps became popular, AT&Ts revenue could take a serious hit. AT&T /Apples logic doesnt even make sense. If the object is to prevent you from making cheap international calls, then they would also have to block Skype and all the other apps (already available ) that let you do so. If its to prevent you from sending free text messages, then they should also block FreeMMS and other apps that already do that. Its almost as though AT&T /Apple never really cared while the apps in question stayed where they belonged-under the radar. But once big-shot Google got involved . Well, we cant have that, can we (The whole thing is especially galling since text messages are pure profit for the cell carriers. Text messaging itself was invented when a researcher found free capacity on the system in an underused secondary cellphone channel: http:// bit.ly/QxtBt. They may cost you and the recipient 20 cents each, but they cost the carriers pretty much zip.) In short, what Apple and AT&T have accomplished with their heavy-handed , Soviet information-control style is not to bury these useful apps. Instead, Apple/AT&T have elevated them to martyr status-and , in effect, thrown down a worldwide challenge to programmers everywhere. Google says it is readying a replacement for the Google Voice app that will offer exactly the same features as the rejected app-except that it will take the form of a specialized, iPhone-shaped web page. For all intents and purposes, it will behave exactly the same as the app would have; you can even install it as an icon on your Home screen. NYT NEWS SERVICE

courtesey: Times of india
http://www1.lite.epaper.timesofindia.com/mobile.aspx?article=yes&pageid=14&edlabel=TOIBG&mydateHid=10-08-2009&pubname=Times+of+India+-+Bangalore&edname=Bangalore&articleid=Ar01402&format=&publabel=TOI&max=true