Apple's single-carrier policy seems to be running afoul of more than just hackers. The decision to lock the iPhone to Orange may cost the company a chance at the French market.

If you can read French, Les Echos reports that the two companies may have to scuttle the planned iPhone launch due to a law which requires all carriers to offer phones both with and without contracts. This would, of course. significantly mess up Apple's uniformly sweet revenue-sharing deals with the iPhone's various American and European carriers. France may not get the iPhone this year, if at all.

06 Oct 2007

Who dropped the ball on this one? You'd think that at some point when everyone at Orange was getting all giddy about securing the rights to the iPhone somebody on the company might have stood up and noted that there's a law against this exact strategy?

Perhaps its time for Apple to go splitsies with Intel and Google on the upcoming free US wireless spectrum, buy out AT&T, T-Mobile, and O2's contracts, and just make a world-wide unlocked iPhone.