PDAPhoneHome.com - View Single Post - Terminate i760 Short Term Confidentiality; Complain to FCC!

I thought I would do a follow up post to comments seen in the Rumor thread as to why we are going forward with this. I totally agree that companies SHOULD have a short-term confidentiality on their products. They should have the ability to work on a device in private and be as secretive as they want to be. The problem is the way that some of these companies are abusing the system. Companies want the best of both worlds, they don't want any information out on any product, yet they want to create hype and make the product visible.

As Mark_A_K mentioned, this could be to the fact that the marketing division and development division don't know what each are doing, but I think it comes down to, they want to tease us, but only let us know what they want until the full release.

So all of this is fine, but the problem is, the companies are violating government guidelines in the process and abusing the system. This is what we are trying to prevent from happening. In the previous post (#19) it shows a copy of the text of the guidelines for Short-Term Confidentiality and how they go about requesting it, and what they have to do to maintain it. It's simple for the companies, they request it, and as long as they continue to request confidentiality within 7 days of the end of the 45, they can continue to request the confidentiality of select documents for up to 180 days, or until the Market the device, or release it.

It doesn't matter that this is the iPhone or the i760. It's the fact that the companies are abusing the system and the FCC is letting them. We have been working on the i760 because they violated this guideline and they didn't follow it correctly in the first place (requesting a blanket 180 days, instead of re-requesting each 45 day block). Apple admitted to violating it in their request. And both companies are still actively "marketing" the device.

If we don't hold the FCC to their own guidelines, and hold the companies responsible for following the guidelines, then who will? Why even have guidelines in the first place?

In this day and age, if people are going to set these rules, then people need to follow them, and they need to be upheld. We have enough of agencies within the government not doing what they should, we should hold them to what they say they are going to do.