FOIA denial all but confirms FTC probe of Apple’s rules barring third-party app excretion software

“The Federal Trade Commission has nearly 200 pages of records related to a purported complaint by Adobe against Apple for banning iPhone developers from using its authoring tools to make iPhone apps,” Ryan Singel reports for Wired. “But, in what might be the most-official confirmation that regulators are probing the ban for antitrust violations, the FTC declined to make them available to Wired.com, saying doing so ‘could be reasonably expected’ to interfere with its ‘law enforcement’ duties.”

“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.