You no longer have to wonder if buying a BlackBerry was a bad call. The ban is off.

In keeping with a long standing tradition of making announcements on the weekend — to ensure that no one can be reached for comment — the Telecommunications Regulatory Agency (TRA) announced Friday morning that it would not be banning BlackBerry services on Monday. Everything is fine. Nothing will change. No problems here. These are not the droids you're looking for. You can go about your business.

No one is surprised either. After talking to business people and other journalists for the past week, I never met anyone who thought the TRA would actually follow through on their "final decision." Brinkmanship was what I heard it called most. No one believed they would actually do it.

Why? Because the fallout from such a decision would far outweigh any security benefits that would be gained. A ban on BlackBerry services would tell the world that the UAE is suspicious of technology. It would have cost local companies tens if not hundreds of thousands of dirhams to replace their current handsets and servers. It would have told companies — you know, those pesky foreign ones the government has worked so hard to bring to Dubai and Abu Dhabi — that working on the emirates means having your trade secrets subjected to government access. It would also have made the TRA look as if it didn't understand the technology it was dealing with, because no ban on a single brand of devices was going to prevent rumours or electronic security issues.

That was always the hardest part to shallow. BlackBerry was never the cause of security problems — true, it could be a channel for them - but banning it would have solved nothing. The majority of BlackBerry users, including business people, would have been punished for the deeds of a few.

Erroneous rumour

That didn't mean that a ban wasn't still a possibility. I noticed an increase in the number of stories last week where BlackBerry played the villain. Let's take a quiz: Apparently someone starts an erroneous rumour last week that 7-Up was banned in the UAE because it contained poisonous substances.

Blame for the rumour went to: A) the general human tendency to spread salacious information by any means of communication possible. B) A misunderstanding of the health benefits of high-fructose corn syrup. C) A rival company trying to blacken the name of a competitor. D) BlackBerry.

The answer of course was D. Why? Didn't the other answers seem plausible enough? (I'm partial to B myself. That stuff will kill you.) The BlackBerry was just one way the rumour spread, assisted I'm sure by email, text messages, and that famous, old-timey standby: human speech.

Even if you remove BlackBerry from the equation, answers A and C aren't going to go away. They'll just find other ways of spreading electronically, including apps designed to simulate the BlackBerry Messenger Services on other devices, including Apple, Android and even Nokia.

There will be some who welcome this as a victory for the TRA. I'm not sure why.

While it's hard to nail down where, there are likely BlackBerry servers currently being placed in the UAE, which gives the country the jurisdiction they were looking for. However, according to the experts we talked to, authorities will now have access to a box full of messages encrypted to such a high level degree that Nato has certified them as a secure enough for "secret" messages. Good luck cracking those. It may be just me, but it's looking like this announcement was just a way for the TRA to save face in a fight they should never has started.

Speaking of villains, there is also a rumour going around that Steve Jobs was behind the whole BlackBerry ban as a way to drive sales of the new iPhone 4. Well done, Steve.