Steve Jobs wants the iPad, which goes on sale in the UK today, porn free. He’s said so. And unlike most people, he can make this sort of thing happen. Approval for Apple’s App store involves passing the censor — and the threshold is quite high: Germany’s Stern magazine recently failed because it runs topless photographs.
It’s not clear whether this just applies to visual porn — nor how this is defined. Are the works of the Marquis de Sade pornography? Will there be an iPad app for Last Exit to Brooklyn?
Well, no one has to buy the iPad or any other Apple product. So this seems to be fair enough. There are plenty of alternatives at the moment. Google, for example, in contrast to Apple seems committed to openness. But what if Apple grew and completely dominated the market? What if just about every e-book or e-magazine publisher chose to do exclusive deals with them? Suppose Apple decides on a whim that it’s not just porn they want to control but anything that might be deemed “offensive”? We’d end up with Steve Jobs or his successor as a de facto online censor, and self-censorship being the route to e-publication readable on the device everyone is using. Is this the future we want? Are we happy that Jobs is controlling iPad content so carefully already?
4 Comments
I’m not sure it’s really feasible to talk of the iPad as “porn-free”. It’s not even a particularly secret open secret that porn is already freely available through safari, and one assumes that the same will happen with the iPad.
It’s also inconsistent: I just ran a search for “sex” through the App Store and can see a number of apps advertising sex positions, the kama sutra and erotic games on the initial results page.
I don’t see how Apple could render their devices truly porn-free without imposing their own firewall system within the browser, which would harm their business. People buy Apple products in part because of their perceived ease of use. If they start censoring browser content, the inevitable result is that it will make browsing less easy in general given the inevitable collateral damage. If that’s the case, people will just return to their computers.
And all of that ignores that you could just download porn in MP4 format directly onto your iPhone/iPad. Let alone sexting.
I think the starting point is Apple’s reluctance to let its iPad and iPhone users to view Flash videos…
But I agree, at the moment it looks like a difficult trick to pull off
But when Steve Jobs is so explicit about his goals, we have to allow that he might be devising clever solutions to the issues you mention.
Apple’s control is more sophisticated than a simple ban on porn. In the case of books for example taking both examples Nigel give – Sade’s Justine is in UK iBook store from Harper Perennial (and some free ones are on too) while Selby’s Requiem for a Dream but not Last Exit to Brooklyn is on Kindle so therefore available via their app on iPad. Kobo had books from neither but that will be a rights thing not censorship.
Thanks for this Caxtonian. Very interesting and to some extent reassuring.
The more complex picture of multiple apps for reading e-books on the iPod doesn’t preclude both direct and indirect exclusion of whatever they deem ‘inappropriate’ content by Apple if they decide to move in that direction. Let’s see how this evolves.