Friday Morning iPhone Fallacies

Looking for some Friday morning fun? Read this post from Steven Titch, of the misnomered Technology Liberation Front, and count the fallacies.

First, Titch gets it wrong on AT&T’s data capacity and the nature of exclusivity deals:

"The iPhone, for example, would not have been possible if AT&T and Apple did not work together to ensure AT&T’s wireless network could handle the increase in data traffic the iPhone would create."

Ha! This is possibly the most hysterical (and wrong) thing we've read all year. It wouldn't have been possible for AT&T to handle the data traffic? It isn't possible for AT&T to handle the data traffic — the company has said so itself, and we've documented its lack of capacity repeatedly.

Furthermore, despite Titch's implication that Net Neutrality would stop companies like AT&T and Apple from working closely together, nothing involved in the open Internet proceeding — not even the FCC's "open devices" proposal — would make exclusive deals for handsets illegal.

Here's another doozy: "If a non-discrimination rule had been in force two years ago, the iPhone, the Kindle and the iPad would never have happened."

We'd ask for the evidence for this claim, except there isn't any, since it's pure conjecture, with nothing to back it up.

In fact, we have shown repeatedly that Net Neutrality is a pro-innovation policy — one of the many reasons most technology companies, including Amazon, the maker of the Kindle, support it.

There are more money quotes where these two came from. Can you find them?

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