iPhone App Developers Finding Weaknesses in AT&T's Fake Walls

Kevin Maney has seen this movie before: Whenever you open up a previously-closed system and let the technology hordes have at it, the hordes do a pretty good job of finding artificial and inefficient business barriers -- and exploiting them. This is what file-sharing enthusiasts did to the music business. It's what Craigslist users are doing to newspapers.

And now, Apple didn't just open the iPhone to developers -- by opening the iPhone, Apple essentially exposed AT&T's wireless network to the world's coders. Like all major U.S. wireless networks, AT&T's has long been as closed as an old-time communist dictatorship, with accompanying weird inefficiencies that really don't make much sense.

Like: If you have a high-speed data phone, and you have a laptop computer, and you're stuck in some train station with no Wi-Fi and you need to get your laptop on the Net -- why couldn't you tether your phone to your laptop and use the phone as a modem? The answer, really, is that AT&T wants to sell you a separate device and separate plan (at about $60 a month) for wireless Internet access on your laptop. So AT&T's contracts prevent AT&T's phones from being tethered to laptops.

This bit of nonsense is being challenged by a company called Nullriver, which created an iPhone app called NetShare. It turns the iPhone into a wireless modem. Except Apple seems to have been forced by AT&T to take NetShare off the App Store.

But as we've seen in other versions of this story, fake business walls only hold so long in the Internet age.