It never rains but pours for Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry smartphone. RIM’s overseas aspirations are confronted with threats from foreign governments to restrict or ban its services as these countries tighten restrictions on mobile e-mail.
Potential bans from foreign governments threaten RIM's overseas growth.
With the challenges from Apple and Android-based smartphones checking its growth in North America, Canada-based RIM is looking to countries such as India, Indonesia, Brazil and kingdoms in the Middle East for growth. Bloomberg reports that revenue from outside North America and the U.K. nearly doubled last quarter as US sales, which account for a quarter of revenue, dropped 7 percent.
One of BlackBerry’s main strength over competitor’s smartphones is the security it promises for its encrypted messenging service. But it is precisely this that foreign governments are concerned with, since they are worried that the encrypted communications could be used by criminals and terrorists who are targeting their countries. The foreign governments want some means to monitor the BlackBerry communications in their countries.
All BlackBerry e-mails are handled by the company’s own enterprise servers in Canada, making the devices popular with companies and government officials including Barack Obama, who kept his BlackBerry after becoming U.S. president.
A potential solution is to setup proxy servers in overseas countries so that the foreign governments can monitor the communications that uses BlackBerrys in their countries.
An official in India has said that the country may ban BlackBerry e-mail use while Saudi Arabia could take similar steps. The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority in the UAE has announced that, from October 11, BlackBerry’s Messenger, e-mail and Web browsing services will be halted.
Tags: BlackBerry, e-mail, messenger, RIM