What’s Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And The FCC | Hacker News Reader

What’s Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And The FCC

techcrunch.com

66 pointscwan24 comments

And see, here's a place where an ounce of credibility would really come in handy for TechCrunch. And there you have it. Are these anonymous sources any better than the anonymous sources they had for Last.fm?

I don't think that's fair. They certainly have an "ounce" of credibility. This piece struck me as pretty good journalism on something pretty important, and I think it would be good for credibility all round to give them that.

Admittedly, the sources are anonymous, but could one expect otherwise given the material? I also appreciate the piece's directness, which is a refreshing contrast to the mealy-mouthed, there-is-no-truth-only-opposing-opinions cowardice of the MSM. (Of course, if you're going to say outright that someone is lying you had better be sure you are right.)

By the way, was the Techcrunch story on Last.fm definitively discredited? (That's not a troll - I don't follow these things very closely and am sincerely curious.) I was under the impression that it was left in an ambiguous state with both sides insisting they were right.

Good journalism? It's sourced entirely anonymously and interleaves editorial commentary and prediction (!) with (supposed) factual reporting.

If journalism is what gets practiced in leading newspapers, then being sourced entirely anonymously is now standard practice. As for commentary and prediction, ok, if your definition of journalism doesn't allow for that, we can call this something else. Whatever the genre, this piece has some merit. Give me a reason to believe that your hate-on for TC isn't simply knee-jerk. (I'm not a huge fan of TC, mostly because I find the material boring. But the hardcore anti-TC mentality is puzzling to me. Unless it's like the hipsters who in 1990 were huge Nirvana fans until too many people started liking them, whereupon Nirvana sucked and were sell-outs.)

I like In Utero more than I like Bleach.

I stopped being OK with TechCrunch when they went after Blaine Cook personally for Twitter's reliability issues.

I can point out lots of random incidents that have caused me to write off TechCrunch (Last.fm being the most prominent). But those are just symptoms. The disease is replacing the profession of journalism with clowns like Arrington. The pathology that results is "publications" with:

* No sourcing policies

* No retraction policies

* No conflict of interest controls

* No separation between editorial and reporting

You're better off with a Murdoch paper than with TechCrunch. At least the WSJ does great reporting outside the editorial pages. Here you're disputing whether there's a non-knee-jerk reason to dislike TechCrunch, over a story in which Arrington uses anonymous sources to assert that Apple is acting quasi-unlawfully, in part over behavior that Arrington simply doesn't like. You couldn't get this published in a column in a mainstream paper.

I stopped being OK with TechCrunch when they went after Blaine Cook personally for Twitter's reliability issues.

I'd forgotten about that. You're right, that was awful.

Edit: I like pop songs. At least Bleach had one.

Edit 2: Did you know that the WSJ is Noam Chomsky's favorite newspaper?

Do you have a source for WSJ being Chomsky's favorite newspaper?

And I don't know if there's that much difference between them and the Times (except Editorials, of course) anymore. Both have very few real "reporters" who do even the basics of journalism, such as checking facts and assertions for correctness and not just "he said, she said"...

Doesn't really matter that is such a small part of the story.

From the language of Apple's statement it is fairly obvious they are being weaselly about the meaning of the word "reject" in addition to being dishonest about what the Google voice app actually does. This whole response reads like a carefully crafted PR statement. I love Apple products but they've really managed to dig themselves into a hole here.

Indeed. If you didn't reject the application, then you don't need to explain why you rejected it.

That's like saying "I didn't eat the cookie from the cookie jar; I was really hungry and it was delicious."

A very controversial post.

I do get tired of bloggers disputing what should be fact by mixing it with rumors or secondary sources...

[techcrunch quote]: "The first part of Apple’s argument, that they never rejected the application, is “a total lie,” according to many sources with knowledge of the Google Voice application process." ... "There is overwhelming evidence that Apple did in fact reject the application."

[daringfireball quote]: "Google’s initial statement regarding this did not use the word rejected either. Their spokesperson told TechCrunch: “Apple did not approve the Google Voice application we submitted six weeks ago to the Apple App Store.”"

Who is trying to mislead us here? Techcrunch throws unnamed "overwhelming evidence" and unnamed "sources" at my face, while daringfireball talks about Google's "initial" statement. Was there a second or third statement that cleared things up?

Anybody have the facts?

Gruber at Daring Fireball also retracts when he gets things wrong.

I don't see the problem here. TechCrunch is reporting info from Sources where as DaringFireball is quoting from the official statement. These are two different things and more to the point they're two things that almost always contradict each other (there's no point in quoting sources if those sources are just repeating what the official statement says)

  re⋅ject
  3. to refuse to accept (someone or something);
  source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/reject

Seem to me like the "reject"/"not approve" disparity is splitting hairs.

I'm not going to claim to know how long Apple should be allowed to "ponder" the Google Voice app, as they said they are doing in their answers to the FCC's questions. Six or eight weeks seems like plenty of time to decide.

However, there is a big difference between an app being still under review and being rejected.

Arrington's language claiming that Apple's answer to the FCC was "a total lie" reminds me of Dick Cheney talking about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There's "overwhelming evidence"? And that's enough for you to accuse Apple of lying to the FCC on TechCrunch? Obviously not all journalists hold themselves to the same standards.

There may be a big difference between an app under review and being rejected. There's also a difference between an app being sold in store for months and an app being pulled from the store! Reminder, it was Apple pulling 3 existing Google voice applications that prompted questions to Google about the status of their official app in the first place.

Google's response at the time sounded pretty final: "We will continue to work to bring our services to iPhone users, for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers."

So once an application is submitted to the App Store, it can safely be considered and discussed as having been rejected until the author has been notified of it's approval?

I do get tired of bloggers disputing what should be fact by mixing it with rumors or secondary sources...

The companies that get reported on are no better with their "We definitely won't be doing X" and then they do X.

I think this story isn't grounded very well but there's a kind of precedent with Apple's DRM play with iTunes.

Here's something that seems to be left out of this discussion: there was an existing Google Voice application on the App Store called GV Mobile. At the time that Google's own app was either "rejected" or "held for further review", Apple also pulled GV Mobile from it's App Store. That at least, is rejection.

If Apple was so damned worried about Google controlling so much on their default user experience, maybe they should have thrown Yahoo a bone past just the Weather app. Or given AOL/Mapquest the Maps app. Apple has only itself to blame for giving Google that much control over the default apps, and thus, the default user experience.

The stock app is also from Yahoo!(finance). Given that Maps/Youtube are from google,that puts yahoo/google at 2 default apps each.

The default search in Safari is also through Google. And to be fair, Maps+Youtube are more significant apps than Weather+Stocks in terms of usage and complexity (should be easy to swap out the Yahoo sources for some other ones).

Two words: Push Email

Yes, there's a preset icon for both Yahoo and Gmail but iPhone supported push email for Yahoo mail accounts, still does, and still does not have push email from Google.

To get Yahoo push email working before the 3.0 with "push" for everyone, Apple allowed Yahoo's mail a feature only shared on the iPhone by the MobileMe subscription service.

There's probably been a change in mindset at Apple over the last 2 years, from seeing Google more as a partner to seeing it more as a competitor. Unless something from Google (like Search/Maps/Youtube) is obviously of big value to most iPhone users, Apple would probably want to keep Google on the outer side of the wall.

bias(TechCrunch) == CrunchPad

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