On Tuesday it was revealed that Apple had banned Google Voice from the iPhone app store. The new service has the potential to be a game changer, allowing users, among other things, to send free SMS messages and make international calls at reduced rates. The obvious conclusion was that AT&T played a role in the ban, given that SMS revenues are a massive cash cow with a limited life span the carrier wants to protect at any cost. When we asked AT&T if it was their call, they told us to ask Apple, who is too cool to comment publicly. Neither should get a free pass, yet both probably will.

AT&T has shown they have the authority to cripple or ban applications that erode AT&T's bottom line. The Skype application for iPhone was released back in March with crippled 3G functionality to limit its impact on AT&T voice revenues. 3G functionality was also crippled on the Slingbox app, and while AT&T blamed network congestion, the telco has been cooking up their own place-shifting solution exclusive to iPhone and U-Verse users for some time.

More motive? The vast majority of executives at AT&T despise Google because the search giant represents their deepest fear: a future where companies like AT&T are just dumb pipes, over which content companies deliver services that soak up advertising revenue old school phone executives really do believe belongs to them. The baby bells so despise Google, they pay gentlemen whose entire purpose is to smear the search giant.

While the motive for AT&T is fairly obvious, not everybody seemed to think AT&T deserved the blame. Blogger Om Malik has been arguing for several days that AT&T couldn't be responsible for the ban, because AT&T hadn't banned the Google Voice app via Blackberry. Of course that's only because AT&T doesn't have the technical ability to do so under the decentralized Blackberry app distribution platform. Otherwise they certainly would.

On Tuesday, blogger John Gruber cited a source at AT&T who confirmed AT&T was behind the decision, but the debate still seems to be raging over who exactly deserves the blame. Why precisely we can't blame both AT&T and Apple isn't exactly clear.

It's not clear yet whether AT&T's recent missteps have Apple reconsidering their iPhone exclusivity arrangement, but judging from AT&T's earnings, there's no doubt AT&T would like to extend the deal, which expires next year. That said, CEO Randall Stephenson was realistic today that the deal may be nearing its end, telling conference attendees at Fortune's Brainstorm: Tech conference in Pasadena that he at least acknowledges the deal won't last forever.Highlighting the lowest churn rate in company history, Stephenson crowed to attendees that "there's no greater cause of churn than network quality." In reality, the reduced network churn is largely thanks to the use of long-term contracts and ETFs to keep customers, and the fact that the Apple brand has a loyal following that would follow Apple through pretty much any pasture -- including AT&T's -- no matter what they were stepping in.

Stephenson's facing denial if he thinks AT&T network reliability is the cornerstone of the company's low customer defection rate, given the fact you can't retain an AT&T 3G connection while walking down Fifth Avenue. It's really in Apple's court as to whether the deal gets extended, but with the amount of griping among Apple fans about AT&T's network, Apple may not want to risk tarnishing its brand among members of the cult of Mac.

No matter how it's spun by the faithful and the technorati, Apple extending the deal would send a very clear message to Apple fans that the company places cold hard cash above a high-quality user experience.

Over at the Apple blog, Dave Greenbaum laments the rise in frequently unreasonable caps and meters in an age of increasing bandwidth use, and hopes Apple gets involved in the debate in order to protect its "brand." Greenbaum's particularly annoyed with his ISP in Lawrence, Kansas, Sunflower broadband, who imposes monthly caps as low as 3GB a month with overages as high as $2.00 per gigabyte. At their website, Sunflower defends the practice by saying that 49.46% of their customers use less than 1 GBs of bandwidth a month, and 86.98% use less than 10GB. Or at least that was the case in 2007, the year Sunflower is pulling their statistics from.

Apple has been taking heat over global advertisements that show the iPhone 3G performing at speeds vastly faster than real world 3G (or 2G) networks operate. Two such ads were recently banned in the UK, to which Apple responded that the ads were "relative rather than absolute in nature." Here in the States, one 70-year-old San Diego resident filed suit against Apple for misleading advertising. Techdirt directs our attention to the fact that Apple this week responded to the suit, denying that the ads lie, but then adding this comment:In other words, we're not lying, but you're an idiot if you believed what we were saying. Of course there's a fairly obvious chasm (see video comparison) between the ads and real-world performance. Apple faces five lawsuits related to the performance (or lack thereof) of the iPhone when connected to networks in the real world, but the attorney for this false advertising case thinks their case "has the most teeth and the most legs to it."

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