“Wired.com sought a copy of Adobe’s complaint by filing a Freedom of Information Act request in early May, which was denied in whole in a July 23 letter,” Singel reports. “We have located 189 pages of responsive records, all of which are exempt from the FOIA’s disclosure requirement,’ wrote Joan A. Fina, the FTC’s assistant general counsel. ‘These records are exempt… because disclosure of that material could reasonably be expected to interfere with the conduct of the Commission’s law enforcement activities.'”
Singel reports, “The language all but confirms that the FTC is actively investigating Apple, which was heavily criticized for the ban put in place earlier this year.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple (which has nothing resembling a monopoly, by the way) along with every other company on earth that so desires, has every right to protect their platforms from lowest common denominator crapware that fails to take advantage of unique OS hooks. We don’t want generic ports excreted by lazy developers on our iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches and neither should the FTC or any other government entity.
Is the FTC, in all of their collective brilliance, going to probe Microsoft (Xbox), Sony (PlayStation), and Nintendo (Wii) for “antitrust violations,” too? Sounds really stupid, right? Because it is.
@MDN Take. For some reason, it doesn’t sound as stupid when Adobe says it. Maybe it’s because of the cash bribes err… lobbying.
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Excretion software is the correct term to use. All they do is excrete shit software.
FTC = The lowest form of ambulance chasers in existence.
Adobe is crying because they spent big big bucks for Macromedia just get Flash and now Flash is being over taken my better technology. Once the Porn industry moves to HTML 5, Flash will be DEAD!
Why isn’t my login working on the iPhone app? MDN, did you write this with an Adobe compiler?
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All joking aside (except for the REALLY can’t login on the phone part), I will never buy anything from lazy developers who want to use Adobe compilers to write for all platforms. It shows your lack of programming talent.
MW: without — the iPhone will survive WITHOUT Adobe shitware.
There are times when I truly greive for what America is becoming. It is pitifully sad when the pioneering spirit of a nation is replaced by one of entitlement.
I agree, can live without adobe software on my iPhone… It’s all just junk software anyways
Is “excretion software” just another term for “fart apps?”
…excretion software…
Sounds nasty to me too.
Apple has 3% of the phone market. Anti-trust doesn’t apply. Nothing to see here people.
Usually, stupid never concerns me, but… stupid has never prevented the government from doing something.
This is all a bunch of nothing. It’s caused by the fact that most people, including those at the FTC, know virtually nothing about technology. So, it takes them a couple of hundred pages of rambling around to come to the same conclusion that is self evident to the rest of us.
Nothing here, this is a non issue. It’s never going to see the light of day.
Oh, and BL5? The drama is way overdone.
Yeah, Apple is SO anti-competetive.
Sure, Adobe wants to seize control of the entire iOS platform and transform it into one big advertisement for Flash, Action Script, and their over-priced authoring tools…
But Apple’s the one being anti-competitive somehow.
Rescue us, somebody! Rescue us from the freedom of not being locked into the Adobe hegemony!
“Is the FTC, in all of their collective brilliance, going to probe Microsoft (Xbox), Sony (PlayStation), and Nintendo (Wii) for “antitrust violations,” too?”
MDN, your take is valid to a point (which I agree with). But I think the issue is, no body complained about Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. The problem is Adobe is having a hissy fit and lodged a formal complaint against Apple.
Personally I think we should follow Apple’s lead and ban buying/using Adobe’s software. I make my living using their software, so I don’t say this lightly, but enough is enough. Adobe stopped adequately serving the Mac community a decade ago. I say, it’s time to kick them to the curb.
People, you may want to read more carefully before posting.
FTC had NO CHOICE but to investigate; Adobe filed a complaint and asked for an investigation. FTC is not your ordinary court where the judge can make a decision whether to dismiss a law suit or not. When FTC receives a complaint, it is required, by law, to investigate it all the way to the very end. Thus, almost 200 pages of response, and since the investigation isn’t complete, no FOIA disclosure.
In other words, the problem is not FTC, it is Adobe.
And, as 3rdKidney says, as soon as somebody files a complaint against Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo, FTC will dutifully investigate those.
Adobe has, by no act of their own (it was in fact by acquisition of Macromedia) built a virtual computing platform that was universal and ubiquitous, which gave them a perfect position in any future OS wars. No matter how large Mac OS X desktop share grows (and Windows shrinks), Flash applications will run on all desktops. Then, in swoops Apple with a new OS and rapidly starts building market share. And to make things worse for Adobe, they prohibit development of run-time interpreters for Flash for the new OS (iOS). So, now, Adobe is watching a brand new mobile platform take hold and expand its footprint, and they can’t even get into that platform. They have hundreds of thousands of developers for their little (Flash) platform, but they can’t develop anything for the new iOS unless they abandon Adobe’s Flash. No wonder Adobe has that hissy fit…
My tax dollars at work . . .
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Great.
Adobe: Brick by brick, building their legacy of bloated crap.
I thought the FTC employees were too busy watching porn in their offices to work on things like this.
Adobe is absolutely positively obnoxious. My ban of Adobe starts NOW.
If Adobe wants to develop an application that will let developers create a Cocoa-based Objective-C project. Then fine. But after that, Apple needs Xcode to be able to open the project and make sure that the developer has the correct license etc. to post the app to the App Store for review. PERIOD.
If Adobe wants some other tools to create iPhone apps, TOO BAD. They need to comply with a system that will basically build an Xcode project at the end of the day. However they want to do that is totally up to them. They are free to develop their own Objective-C classes to make it easier on themselves.
WHATEVER ADOBE if you are reading.
Shouldn’t someone investigate and sue Adob for creating the biggest vector for incoming virus attacks?
See this is what I don’t get… I should file a complaint to the FTC because I can’t use HTML to code for Flash? Adobe is simply trying to ride on the success of Apple and sell their product. We should refuse to buy these products as I know many people are. If the FTC somehow finds something wrong (what are they smoking?) then we will appeal and use every power of the judicial system to knock some sense into them. Simple as that.
Apple walks a fine line – it is one thing to disallow a developer to put his application on a phone – it is another to disallow how he builds the application – it’s like saying you can’t use non-Apple programs to build applications for Apple hardware.
Apple’s EULA is the documentation of their responsibility to the developers and users – it is the basis by which they can decline responsibility for inappropriate use of the phone or software. They can’t stop you from using it incorrectly, but they can dodge responsibility for your experience if you choose to do so.
So if you jailbreak your phone, they have no responsibility to support its future function or compatibility with their (or anyone else’s) software upgrades. That’s where Apple can legally draw the line, and they have.
@ dd–
I had the log-in problem too.
Delete and reinstall the app. That fixed it for me.