Tuesday, Apr 20, 2010    Text size: 

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has recently been responding to customer complaints over the company's perceived role as content censor — a situation made more troubling by its tight control of the primary content distribution mechanism for its popular i-Platforms.

Previously, Jobs made headlines for referring adult consumers to the competitive Android platform for their mobile porn fix, when after an iPhone developer event he commented, "You know, there's a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn."

"You can download porn, your kids can download porn," Jobs opined. "That's a place we don't want to go — so we're not going to go there."

Following up on that remark, Jobs reportedly sent the following reply to a customer that expressed concern over the banning of a comic app by political satirist Mark Fiore. In his email to Jobs, Apple customer Matthew Browing expressed his desire for porn to remain out of the hands of children and consumers who do not want it.

"Heck — I'm all for ensuring that I don't have to see it unless I want to," Browning wrote. "But… that's what parental controls are for. Put these types of apps into categories and allow them to be blocked by their parents should they want to."

"Apple's role isn't moral police — Apple's role is to design and produce really cool gadgets that do what the consumer wants them to do," Browning added.

Jobs, however, reportedly disagrees with the notion that the company should not act as the arbiter of good taste, and while he claimed that the Fiore ban was mistaken and has been reversed, porn is another matter.

"We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone," Jobs wrote. "Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone."

"Steve Jobs says that Apple isn't going to 'go there' where offering access to porn is concerned," Q Boyer, Pink Visual director of public relations, told XBIZ. "Apparently nobody has clued Jobs in on the fact that the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad all come equipped with Safari?"

"Whether he likes it or not, his company has already 'gone there,'" Boyer added. "With respect to offering its customers easy access to pornography, and judging by our site stats, his customers are 'going there' in droves, every single day."

The message for adult developers is clear — and it is a message that had Panasonic uttered it many years ago, would have earned many Betamax sales for Sony and could have spelled the end of VHS. Time will tell if adult consumers and marketers can once again be the deciding factor in the future market domination of a given platform.