Today Google dropped the confidentiality request of their FCC filing about the Google Voice app rejection, making the statement fully accessible online. According to the Google Public Policy blog, they requested that certain parts of the filing be redacted due to "sensitive commercial conversations between the two companies."
The company goes on to state its reasoning for making the documents public, "several individuals and organizations submitted Freedom of Information Act requests with the FCC seeking access to this information. While we could have asked the FCC to oppose those requests, in light of Apple's decision to make its own letter fully public and in the interest of transparency, we decided to drop our request for confidentiality," says
The most interesting item in the released documents is the statement below:
"On July 7, Mr. Eustace [Senior VP of Engineering and Research at Google] and Mr. Schiller spoke over the phone. It was during this call that Mr. Schiller informed Mr. Eustace that Apple was rejecting the Google Voice application for the reasons described," the document states on page 4.
The document goes on to say that, "Apple's representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone. The Apple representatives indicated that the company did not want applications that could potentially replace such functionality."
You can read the full letter in which Google talks about both the Google Voice and Google Latitude apps on the FCC site (PDF link).
Google Public Policy Blog via Gizmodo
