Slowdog

The beauty of the Ninjawords story — what drew me to it like a magnet — is not that it is a particularly important case, but rather that it is particularly simple. The problems are clear, uncomplicated, and, I think, undeniable.

I have to disagree with Gruber on this one: I don’t think the Google Voice is particularly important as it’s purely a matter of business. It might be a more complex issue since there’s more parties and issues involved. And it’s very important from a business perspective. But, ultimately, it’s just business.

The Ninjawords decision by contrast is pure censorship.

From Schiller’s letter to Gruber:

The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable. A quick search on Wiktionary.org easily turns up a number of offensive “urban slang” terms that you won’t find in popular dictionaries such as one that you referenced, the New Oxford American Dictionary included in Mac OS X. Apple rejected the initial submission of Ninjawords for this reason, provided the Ninjawords developer with information about some of the vulgar terms, and suggested to the developer that they resubmit the application for approval once parental controls were implemented on the iPhone.

Whether they are doing it because “many reasonable people might find [these words] upsetting or objectionable” or not, it’s still censorship.

And to go down that road at all, for the “good of the people” or not, is a dangerous precedent (and just plain stupid in my opinion). In doing this, they are showing signs of the arrogance of many past distributors (film, television and record companies, book publishers, governments, now also Internet and cell phone providers, and there’s more), that they know more than “the people” and should control what “the people” have access to.

I know, I know, Apple has always been arrogant, but this, it seems to me, is a different direction for them. It’s one thing to find other’s lack of aesthetics or ease-of-use objectionable, another to find their content objectionable. Further, Apple has always praised its users as if we were some sort of elite. Recently, they’ve moved towards a position of paternalism (at best) or condescension (at worse).

While this doesn’t mean much overall to our lives (since Apple is not our government or our religion, after all, despite what some people think), it should give us pause as this is a step towards empire-ship (I really need a better word here). Think AT&T in the 70′s, IBM in the 70′s and early 80′s, Microsoft in the late 80′s and early 90′s. Not saying Apple is going away any time soon (all these companies are still around, of course, though the first two are quite different from what they were in their hey-day and MS will soon be though they haven’t realized it yet), but it’s a step in that direction. A direction toward not only unchecked arrogance, but also unfocussed and uninteresting products. And that would be a shame.