Apple, sometimes you baffle me. First there was the debacle surrounding the rejection of an app by Mark Fiore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. You said no, then you said yes, and Steve Jobs managed to put his foot in his mouth in the meanwhile.
Then there was this small fiasco surrounding nudity in a comic adaptation of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” You reversed your position on this one pretty quickly, but there was something deliciously ironic about putting the kibosh on a piece of art with a history of inciting censorship battles.
Now, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Apple, and assume you don’t have some unspoken grudge against cartoonists. But that’s only because I believe the root cause of these issues isn’t your censorship policies. Rather, at the core of the problem is your walled garden policy. After all, the app policies only exist to maintain the impeccably cultivated garden. A company might erect the walls with the noblest of intentions, but the walls don’t maintain themselves.
The Internet is a rambunctious ghetto of information. You are creating a neighborhood within the ghetto, essentially gentrifying a little corner of the web for those who opt into your community.
That’s absolutely fine. Apple, you should have this right to provide this to your customers. You should have the freedom to censor any material sold through your store. You should also have the right to maintain the “purity” of the proprietary platform ecology you created, no questions asked. But at the risk of sounding haughty, some caution is in order. If the trend on the Internet is toward open systems and platforms, doesn’t it act against the notion of self-preservation to cling to a top-down methodology in a world that seems to idealize and employ a bottom-up design?
Additionally, these policy skirmishes, the outright rejection of Adobe Flash and the introduction of the iPad should make it clear the Apple isn’t providing an open system. Celebrate H.264 all you like. Keep pushing HTML 5 because, hey, it will benefit us all. But I’ll be honest: all the pro-open source posturing seems a little disingenuous when one considers the strong-arm controls you place on developers. It’s contradictory rhetoric.
I understand that you want to maintain an aesthetic and level of quality. The double talk would be hilarious if it weren’t for the explosive popularity of every product you release. You have a great deal of command when it comes to the future of publishing, communications and culture. It’s largely because you make good products. You shouldn’t be punished for that. Maybe my problem is that amount of control is more than I could ever feel comfortable ensuring to the hands of a corporation.
Just sayin’.