In a latest article by Financial Times, RIM has denied Indian Government’s plead to give them access to their encrypted messaging and email service. This is a complete blow to what Indian users were expecting especially after the very positive talks and negotiations which happened in the past 1 month or so. RIM justifies its decision by saying that they themselves do no have any access to the cryptographic keys used for encryption and that providing a solution to the Indian Government and inter-related security agencies to monitor the blackberry traffic is “technically impossible”.
This definitely raises a concern for blackberry users in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, where similar positive feedback was first shown by RIM. Some countries have mentioned that such negotiation talks were going on since 2007 and 2008. If the “technically impossible” is now a reason, definitely it would have been the same in the past. I believe both parties, RIM and Governments, have tried to play smart and waited for each other’s turn waiting who will give up first.
Looking at this, RIM definitely holds a much stronger position if it does not really care of losing a total of 3-4m users in these regions against its 40+ m users across the globe. As it is Blackberry faces a very strong competition in India where total mobile subscribers are 600m+ of which Blackberry users a mere 1m+. Penetrating more here means a tough battle which I believe RIM is ready to loose. In markets like Indonesia which is predicted to be one of the largest mobile markets after India and China, blackberry sales were 800% higher last year compared to iphone at just 200%.
The current blackberry users however have no say in this corporate/government battle. ISPs on the other hand are more succumbed to such events because any decision to stop the blackberry service could mean the consumer completely giving up on the service unless a very economic way of pushing alternative ways is suggested. This will affect corporate users locally and those visiting these regions. At least for some, a reason like “My Blackberry does not work”, will be considered more rationally.
