Working Assets: Boycott the iPhone

Amid media fanfare and stockholder awe, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced on June 29 the release of the long-hyped iPhone, making 3 million units available for sale to the public. The promise of a phone device that included a camera phone, music and video player, mobile and Wi-Fi access, among other gizmos, generated the kind of frantic consumerism typically reserved for the release of the latest Sony PlayStation system. In the first few days alone, market analysts estimate that more than 500,000 were sold. The iPhone will cost the customer anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000 over the two-year minimum contract.

Wall Street is crowing, the cable networks are cheerleading Apple's latest hot product, but we haven't heard much about consumer opinion on one of the iPhone's big flaws; if you buy one, your carrier is going to be "locked" to AT&T's service. No way around it. This isn't some technological necessity -- the iPhone works on other networks -- but Apple has cut a deal with AT&T to give them the monopoly on carrying the phone's service for the time being. Even worse, the iPhone is also locked away from outside innovators who might design their own applications to function on the iPhone.

Working Assets, the wireless and long-distance phone service and credit card company with an activist network that does advocacy for a wide range of progressive causes, set up an action alert to fight what it perceived to be iPhone's unfair business practice (Disclosure: Working Assets has donated to AlterNet, among other progressive causes).

Working Assets has argued that if consumers who wanted the iPhone but didn't want a service carrier with unsavory corporate practices, such as "turning consumers' information over to the National Security Agency without warrants, their efforts to wipe out net neutrality, or the close to 100 percent Republican giving of their new chairman," they would be "out of luck."

Pointing out that it is "perfectly legal, according to a recent decision from the U.S. Register of Copyrights, for American consumers to unlock their phones for use on whatever network they would like," and that "Apple is trying to take away that right by locking the iPhone to AT&T's network," Working Assets urged its list of activist/customers and online audience to sign a petition telling Steve Jobs to allow for open access to the iPhone on other phone networks.

Petition signers would write Jobs to say they were going to boycott the purchase of the new iPhone:

We, like many other Americans, are anticipating the release of the iPhones. However, we, like many other Americans, will NOT be purchasing an iPhone when they arrive. We choose NOT to use the iPhone because it is "locked" for use only on the AT&T wireless networks.

The campaign against the iPhone took off on the web, hitting the online tech community and online activists who have been fighting against AT&T's complicity in the Bush administration's war on civil liberties. Working Assets President Michael Kieschnik wrote after the campaign's initial success that it had done well because "it put on the table where we and they would like the wireless industry to go -- a market where consumers can choose their own handsets and move freely among competing network providers, all the while being able to download third party applications without obstacle onto their handsets. This is the ethos of the open internet."

But not everyone was supportive of Working Assets's petition -- including Working Assets's own activist network. Summarized Kieschnik on the member feedback, "Some thought that the issue was a trivial one at a time when soldiers are being killed daily in Iraq. Others thought it was self-serving to criticize anyone else in the wireless industry if we did not already offer service that met our own standards."