And as might be expected when any practice attempts to direct profits from one purse to another, locking is becoming the focus of court battles. Wired News delivered to your inbox or hand-held device. Unwired News Sponsored by Cingular Wireless. However, Americans may find that court battles overseas could end up affecting the configuration of WAP phones when they finally arrive in the United States. When WAP phones are locked, users can't change the home page assigned by the phone-service carrier.
Walled gardens appeal to advertisers because they direct traffic to handpicked sites.
He vowed not to lose his business to the telecommunications giant. A France Telecom spokeswoman denied that a lock exists on its mobile phones but only provided released statements touting the number of WAP sites accessible via the Voila search engine. The company predicts that in two years Voila will have more than one million WAP sites indexed. With revenue at the end of last year reaching 27.2 billion euros, France Telecom is France's leading telephone service provider. So Duboscq sued France Telecom.