Suppression Of Speech

by tristero

Nothing says that the makers of electronic content devices can’t censor content. That doesn’t make it a good idea:

A while back, apparently Apple blocked a whole bunch of apps that were basically soft-core porn — girls in bikinis, that sort of thing — and I didn’t notice, because I’m not in the market for that stuff, and don’t favor that kind of exploitation of women anyway. But when we didn’t stop the censorship of soft-core girlie pictures, who knew the next stop would be the censorship of political satire?

(Interjection from the Department of Arrogant Know-It-Allism:

In the history of freedom of expression there is an …intimate relationship between pornography and free speech, especially political satire.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled discussion.)

While I would agree that this is pretty heinous behavior on Apple’s part, you can, on an iPhone at least, go to any website you like. It is not necessary to patronize Apple’s iStore – the only stuff I’ve paid for are professional music apps – in order to get a lot out of the gadget. I finally got a chance to try the iPad and – someone please correct me if I’m wrong – it appears that you can copy text from their e-books app into a word processor – in other words, do what you want with your books.

Apple’s app store policies, as bad as they undoubtedly are, in no way compare to Amazon’s now-infamous erasure of 1984 – of all books! – from its Kindles without informing people beforehand. That is simply unacceptable. Everything about the Kindle points in a very disturbing direction: the closed, limited architecture, the fact that you license books and don’t own them, copying of passages is restricted to use within the device, and Amazon can remotely manage and program the contents of every Kindle they sell. This means I will never own a Kindle or any reading device that manipulates and controls my access to information so aggressively. (True, you can upload your own pdfs to the Kindle, but I’m not sure that even they can’t be erased by Amazon.)

It’s not enough that Amazon apologized: their entire model business model for providing consumers with information on the Kindle is exceedingly dangerous for the future of free speech. We not only must be able to own our copies of our books, it must be physically impossible for the distributors of these devices, or anyone else except the user, to alter or remove our books (and by extension, all media).

Repeat: Apple’s behavior sucks bigtime. Amazon’s is simply way, way, way beyond the pale and goes into something else entirely.

UPDATE: My smart spouse informs me that Apple is re-evaluating Fiore’s app now that he won a Pulitzer. WTF? Does that mean you need to be famous or officially approved before you can say something political (or erotic) in an app? What if Digby wanted to make an app of this blog? She’s not allowed because she hasn’t won a Pulitzer (yet)?

IN some ways, this makes Apple’s behavior and attitude even worse. It’s a first-rate example of the fallacy of arguing from authority.