The business of gatekeeping has blown up in Apple and AT&T’s faces, as more and more tech bloggers, developers and iPhone users vent their rage against the blocking of access to new applications on mobile networks.

On Thursday, The New York Times’ David Pogue wrote about Apple and AT&T’s bone-headed decision to reject the Google Voice application for the iPhone. The new app lets you send free text messages and make two-cent international calls from your iPhone. Apple then retroactively blocked two similar applications – GV Mobile and Voice Central.

Pogue writes that with their "heavy-handed, Soviet information-control" Apple and AT&T have not successfully buried the new innovations, but have instead "elevated them to martyr status" that serves as a rallying point for others.

Indeed, frustration with the gatekeepers is reaching a fever pitch, and many in Washington are taking notice.

Apple and AT&T’s blocking drove Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington to toss out his iPhone and stomach their outrageous $175 termination penalty. The moral cost of doing business with a gatekeeper was too high, explains Arrington: AT&T and Apple "absolutely don’t want people doing exactly what I’m doing -- moving their phone number to Google and using the carrier as a dumb pipe."

Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation has started an online petition urging fellow iPhone users to jettison their gadgets unless Apple stops its anti-competitive practices and censorship. The final straw for Johnson was Apple’s decision to ban certain books and even the dictionary from its App Store.

More than 16,000 Free Press FreeMyPhone activists have called for the FCC and Congress to step in to protect consumers and foster innovation, and to give mobile phone users:

• The freedom to choose any phone on any network.
• The freedom to choose among many carriers in a competitive, low-cost marketplace.
• The freedom to access any Web content, applications or services we want through our phones.

"I've reached a point where I can no longer just sit back and watch this," wrote Steven Frank, a onetime Apple evangelist. "The iPhone ecosystem is toxic, and I can't participate any more until it is fixed. As people have told me so many times: It's Apple's ballgame, and Apple gets to make the rules, and if I don't like it, I can leave. So, I don't like it, and I'm leaving."

In short, Apple and AT&T have gotten themselves into trouble. And the Federal Communications Commission is now sniffing around to make sure they don’t make things any worse for people who expect access to the best innovations and choices via their shiny new handheld devices.

At a time when wireless carriers seek to become gatekeepers of a new generation of mobile Internet devices and applications, our regulators must re-assert consumers’ right to open networks.