In the business world, disputes are as natural and abundant as snow in the arctic.  Like the snow in the arctic, these disputes are rarely seen by the public but Skype and Fring seem to be exceptions to the rule now that they’re in an ugly and public battle of words.  Fring opened fire on their blog accusing Skype of blocking Fring interoperability and calling Skype “cowards”.  Skype fired back saying that Skype didn’t block Fring but Fring was in violation of Skype’s Application Programming Interface (API) Terms of Use (TOU) and end user license agreement (EULA).

So either Skype is lying or Fring is lying, but the more likely possibility is that Skype is playing with words.  If I were to guess what the real story is, I would say that Skype is threatening to sue Fring if they don’t change their application to comply with Skype’s API TOU and EULA so Fring decided to stop supporting Skype.  That means while Skype didn’t technically block Fring, they’ve compelled Fring to stop connecting to Skype the way they were doing so.  This would be like Joe telling Tom that if he set foot on school grounds, he can expect to get a beating.  But Joe in this case is claiming that he isn’t blocking Tom from entering the school.

So who’s right and who’s wrong?  I don’t know but that’s something for the courts to decide and possibly the justice department if there is a monopoly situation.  But now that the FCC has decided to start weighing in on business and application development issues, does the FCC really want to step in and play the parental role whenever any business dispute arises?  Based on this FCC’s history, I would appear that their involvement is rather selective.

The FCC demanded an explanation from Apple and AT&T for the rejection of the Google Voice App (note that the Google Voice web service was never blocked on the network or the phone) on the iPhone despite the fact that Google never filed a public complaint.  Yet no FCC inquiries were made when Google blocked Syabas set-top-box devices from connecting to YouTube or when Skype blocks all other telephony protocols from Skype embedded devices through the use of their API terms.  Now it appears that Skype is wielding their API as a weapon again, so is the FCC going to play API cop like they did in the Google Voice App case?  It would seem like all these cases belong in court or maybe before the FTC if anti-trust applies.