For the second summer in a row, while most other UAE government decision-makers are sensibly holidaying in cooler climes, the country’s government-controlled Telecommunications sector has made a bold decision. And as happened in the middle of 2009 with the BlackBerry ‘spyware’ issue, the decision has landed the UAE on the front pages of many of the world’s newspapers and news websites – in a rather unflattering light.
Yesterday, the UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) announced on its website that BlackBerry services would be suspended within the country as of 11th October. And today, the story of the UAE government’s dispute with BlackBerry manufacturer RIM is a leading story in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal and the FT to the BBC’s website.
Whether or not the UAE government is justified in demanding access to the BlackBerry security codes, there are at least two immediate impacts of the TRA’s decision. The first is the frustration and inconvenience that will be caused to the UAE’s c.500,000 BlackBerry users (and presumably a similar number of BlackBerry-using business travellers transiting annually through Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports) who are now faced either with the prospect of having to buy an alternative smartphone and go through the typically bureaucratic process of switching mobile phone subscription, or at least the uncertainty of not knowing whether the UAE and RIM will settle their dispute before the deadline.
But that’s a relatively minor irritation in the grand scheme of things. And to their credit, the two government-owned telecoms operators (including Etisalat who kept so quiet during last summer’s troubles) have taken full page adverts in the local newspapers today to try to reassure their BlackBerry customers that alternatives will be made available.
Much more importantly, the decision by the TRA (and we will probably never know the level of higher-up-the-decision-chain support the announcement received) has managed to achieve the sort of front-page press attention that Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s marketing machines can usually only dream about … except that the lingering impression left in the mind of all readers is rather more likely to be concern about a country where the government is so desperately keen to be able to access the personal correspondence of its citizens, rather than a strong urge to visit or invest in the country.
One can only imagine whether the author of the TRA’s press release yesterday had any idea of the global perceptions of his/her employer’s country that would be created today when he/she turned yesterday to the TRA’s web publishing software and pressed ‘Publish’ …
