trythis

Airlines are very different from carriers. The market for air travel is dominated by frequent one-off transactions (with consumers often using multiple airlines for a single trip), and boasts several good ways to compare availability and cost. A new entrant can start off with a few routes, build a good reputation, and grow out from there.

New entrants in the telecom market are considerably disadvantaged by comparison. Consumers in this market make long-term purchasing decisions, often driven by contract pricing,and there remain no good, well known ways of comparing providers. The situation is even worse if you're a new wireless carrier, since coverage is crucial and the market is pointlessly segmented by phone tech.

I'm not saying we couldn't benefit from deregulation in some aspects of this market, but the devil is very much in the details, and simply pointing out that "deregulation" helped improve a market with high capital requirements for entry isn't saying much.

You're mistaken on this point. The courts already rejected the ancillary jurisdiction rationale, and rather than wait for Congress to make a decision on net neutrality, the FCC adopted a new rationale (which, as I recall, hinged upon reclassifying broadband traffic) to justify imposing their net neutrality rules. All of this is in grellas' post. The issue grellas is raising is whether it's acceptable to let a regulatory body like the FCC make such broad assertions of authority at all. The matter of ancillary jurisdiction is already done and settled.

When I said we're not in any real danger of the FCC having a "broad, unchecked power to control what happens on the internet," my point was that irrespective of whether Congress denies the FCC this authority right now, it always has the power to do so. And though it's irrelevant to my point, if the courts had upheld the ancillary jurisdiction rationale, Congress could always strike that down, too. This situation isn't like the executive branch jockeying with the legislative branch for power: the FCC is not a peer of Congress.

Thanks for the explanation, cookiecaper. I guess I should clarify that I agree with grellas' analysis, but that I think the larger issue is how net neutrality plays out in Congress, whether it involves an overreaching FCC or not.

It certainly does give me pause, but we also know how the Republicans will come down on net neutrality regardless of whether an overreaching regulatory body is advocating (some version of) it. That, to me, is the bigger story.

As you said, the FCC can only do what Congress has authorized it to do, so we're not in any real danger of the FCC having a "broad, unchecked power to control what happens on the internet". What we are in danger of is having a Congress that kills net neutrality, period.

Edit: Not that I care about karma, but I'm curious as to why I'm being downvoted. I'm not disagreeing with grellas' point.

You're persistently and needlessly inflammatory, which is sufficient to be considered a troll. And if you actually do think that, you're making a false dichotomy.

But really I think you just get a perverse thrill from pissing people off on occasion. Grow up.

Afaik, you're supposedly free to ship a phone with Bing as long as it doesn't say "with Google". I assume the BusinessWeek report is saying that Google's trying to block Bing even if the phone doesn't say "with Google", otherwise this wouldn't be newsworthy. But maybe that's not the case, and Verizon's just trying to raise a stink. Unfortunately, Rubin's response doesn't exactly clarify things.

Does the CDD disallow using a non-Google search engine? A quick perusal of the latest CDD suggests that isn't the case.

My understanding is that you have to use Google's search engine if you want to slap "with Google" on the back of your phone.

Please stop trolling.

Actually, there are quite a lot of standard UIKit objects used in the iPhone version, so it definitely isn't written from scratch. Granted, it doesn't explain why the Android version makes such a poor showing, since I'm pretty sure Android has equivalents for a lot of those elements.

There are, however, so many possible reasons why Android versions get the shaft that it's nearly impossible to say why any given pair of apps are so different in quality. It could be that it's easier to find iOS devs that really care about UX and polish (lots of self-selection going on here, similar to Mac/Windows third-party devs). It could be that a company asks their iOS dev to knock out an Android version, when they're not competent at developing for the platform. It could be that the folks in charge of getting mobile apps made for their company just like iPhones more (not a stretch, given demographic differences) or see them as more hip or marketable and funnel more money that way. Or, it could be that, after spending lavish amounts of money on the iPhone app and seeing it not set the world on fire, they scale back to merely "establishing a presence" on Android instead of making the same effort.

A lot of these behaviors wouldn't surprise me, particularly from companies whose primary business is not creating software.