RIM, India at Stalemate as Deadline Arrives
Research In Motion has reached another impasse in its negotiations with the Indian government, and this one may not be as easily overcome as those that preceded it. Though New Delhi has been provided with access to RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service and BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), it continues to demand access to the company’s BlackBerry Enterprise Service–something RIM insists it is unable to provide. With the deadline for compliance with these demands expiring today, the threat of a countrywide ban on BlackBerry services looms in the background.
“They have given us a solution to the Messenger service,” India’s home affairs minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, said today. “We will insist that they give us the solution for the enterprise service too.”
And RIM will likely insist it can’t. Unless the situation has suddenly changed from last week, when VP Robert Crow reiterated the company’s claim that it cannot decipher the encrypted corporate emails sent over its network. “We can’t give a solution for enterprise services,” he said. “It’s not possible to do so, because the keys of that service are with the corporate enterprises and corporate entity that owns the server.”
So what, then? That’s not yet clear, but we may know more shortly. Said Chidambaram, “I think a decision [about the future of RIM in India] will be taken today by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Telecom Ministry.”
How do you say “deadline extension” in Hindi?