Everyone at Gerrard Dennis’ online swimwear business — run out of a business park in Kent, southwest England, with his wife, Jo — is enthusiastic about Apple. The marketing department use Apple computers, senior staff have iPhones. So it came as a shock when Dennis received an e-mail from Apple earlier this year informing him the iPhone app he had spent several thousand dollars developing, advertising his Simply Beach range, had been banned due to sexual connotations.
“We replied saying, ‘Are you sure? Have you had a complaint?’” he said. “But in true Apple style, absolutely nothing back. I felt a bit hard done by. To sell bikinis you have to have pictures of women in bikinis, that’s what you have to do. We’re not talking micro bikinis or anything, we’re talking about normal bikinis.”
Dennis decided to give his grievance an airing on a trade Web site, from where it was picked up by technology blogs. Five days later his app reappeared in the App Store.
“I did try sending them an e-mail to say thanks,” Dennis said. “But no word from Apple. We’re now developing an app for the iPad and we hold no malice. I think my comment was, ‘It seems unfair that we’re caught up in Apple’s puritanic morals, but we understand why they’re doing it.’”
In the past year, with much-hyped launches of the iPhone and iPad, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has become famed for the stand he has taken against pornography. The company’s developer agreement prohibits “materials ... that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, [eg] materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic or defamatory.”
Recently the London-based Sun newspaper fell foul of the rules, only managing to launch its iPhone app two weeks ago.
Critics have been quick to point out inconsistencies: Since Apple gadgets feature Web browsers, banning rude apps doesn’t stop anyone accessing pornography on the Internet, and while thousands of apps were removed from the App store, Playboy and Sports Illustrated kept theirs. Apple executive Phil Schiller explained that rules apply differently in the case of “a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format.” Staff at Dazed and Confused magazine nicknamed their iPad app “the Iranian version.” However, while in the technology world Jobs’ anti-porn stand is ridiculed as control-freakery or Google-baiting, outside the media loop his views find vocal support.
Jobs has made it clear that it is the idea of children accessing porn that bothers him, and over recent months and years parents’ groups, feminists and anti-pornography campaigners have been making the same point. Pornography, they argue, is ubiquitous as never before. With the click of a mouse, without a credit card, anyone using the Internet can access vast numbers of images of people having sex in a variety of ways, some of them unusual and cruel.
What once was taboo, hidden inside a suitcase or wardrobe in an older male relative’s “girlie magazines,” has moved into all our homes, goes the argument. A new generation growing up on the Internet will be routinely exposed to extreme sexual violence before they have so much as removed their shirts in front of a real-life boyfriend or girlfriend.
When the British, Florida-based internet entrepreneur Stuart Lawley won the right last week to start selling registrations to a new domain devoted to pornographic content, .xxx (known as “dot-triple-x”), he was eager to point out that concerned parents were among those who stood to gain. Registration at .xxx is voluntary, and Lawley believes the first amendment guaranteeing free speech means any attempt by US legislators to corral sex sites into .xxx is doomed to fail. However, he believes that the premium service offered by .xxx — which at US$60 per registration is much more expensive than other domains — will lead to a “natural migration.” Within five to 10 years, he hopes “.xxx will be synonymous with adult online entertainment and will be the first location people look for it,” a kind of online equivalent to the top shelf, an Internet red-light district.
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