• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, August 3, 2009

Earlier this year, advocacy group Free Press asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether AT&T and Apple were violating net neutrality principles by limiting Skype's usefulness on the iPhone.

At the time, Apple refused to approve a Skype iPhone app for free telephone service that would have worked on AT&T's 3G network. Instead, the app only allows iPhone users to make calls with Skype on a Wi-Fi network. Apple imposed the restriction, but apparently did so at AT&T's request. At the time, an AT&T senior executive was quoted in USA Today as saying the company has 'every right' to decline to promote rivals' services.

Now, Apple has pushed the boundaries of neutrality principles even further by completely rejecting an app for Google's voice service, which lets users send SMS messages and make cheap international phone calls.

Apparently, this latest move was too much for the Federal Communications Commission, which requested more information from the companies last week. Among other questions, the FCC is asking what role, if any, AT&T played in the decision to ban Google Voice.

This morning, advocacy group Public Knowledge cheered the FCC's move. "This is exactly the type of aggressive, pro-consumer, pro-competitive action that we want to see from the FCC," Public Knowledge president and co-founder Gigi Sohn said in a statement.

Of course, as a practical matter, tech savvy iPhone users can "jailbreak" their devices and then run any apps on them. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked the U.S. Copyright Office to give its blessing to jailbreaking by ruling that the practice doesn't infringe on copyright. Apple, not surprisingly, opposes this request.