“The past week’s controversy swirling around Apple’s retroactive ban of sexy apps in the App Store seems trivial, but the implications of Apple’s arbitrariness should be disconcerting to members of the press and those who rely on the media for unbiased information,” Chen writes.
“From a legal perspective, Apple can do whatever it wants with the content in its App Store. Apple is not government, and thus it is not governed by the First Amendment,” Chen writes. “But the lack of bikini-clad ladies in the App Store isn’t the issue here. It’s the fact that Apple has so much market power, combined with the fact that magazine and newspaper publishers are getting pumped to produce apps for Apple’s iPad, which will be served through Apple’s tightly regulated App Store. The iPad could very well play a major role in the future of publishing.”
Chen writes, “I’m optimistic that Apple will eventually create a separate section in iTunes for digital newspapers and magazines, giving publishers a platform to distribute their digital content based on a strict, contractual agreement that prevents their content from being arbitrarily removed at Apple’s discretion. Publishers should be waiting until Apple delivers that platform, rather than whipping up iPad apps and subjecting them to the gauntlet of Apple’s approval process.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Until the day newspapers turn off their websites and go “iPad-only” and/or Apple removes Safari and bans all Web browsers, we wouldn’t worry. For example, we have an app in Apple’s App Store (new version, MDN 2.1, just released!), but we also have a mobile site optimized for iPhone OS devices over which Apple has no control. Publishers don’t even need mobile sites, their regular sites will work just fine (provided their web designers use their heads and eschew Adobe’s shitastic Flash). The news media doesn’t have to go through Apple in order to deliver the news.
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