While forcing people to make apps for BlackBerry is a terrible, terrible idea, there's something to be said for restricting content and service providers from c

While forcing people to make apps for BlackBerry is a terrible, terrible idea, there's something to be said for restricting content and service providers from creating artificial OS-specific restrictions. The example BlackBerry uses is Apple prohibiting the development of an iMessage client on any platform except iOS. While it's unreasonable to expect Apple to write an iMessage client for BlackBerry, it's also sort of unreasonable to prevent BlackBerry from writing its own client. Another example that comes to mind is Google's treatment from Windows Phone, which arguably goes beyond simply refusing to write native clients for Windows Phone to active discrimination -- some incidents that come to mind are the degradation of Google Maps and shutting off the Windows Phone YouTube client. In some sense, this is really just an extension of standard antitrust law. It's anti-competitive to use your dominance in one field (e.g. operating systems) to squash competition in another (e.g. browsers). The leap here would be to say that something like iMessages or any of the various Google services constitute a monopoly (or should be regulated as if they were a monopoly). In contrast, it's a little more palatable to extend this to something like net neutrality because many ISPs do effectively have a local monopoly or duopoly. Anyhow, not saying that I agree with them, but I think the post is more than a simple please-make-other-people-write-apps-for-BB plea.