Kuwait has asked BlackBerry’s Canadian maker RIM to block pornographic sites though they will not suspend the messenger services like their Gulf neighbours.
RIM have agreed to block 3,000 porn sites and have promised to do so by the end of this year.
The Chinese authorities have ordered 122 websites to remove all traces of pornography or lewd content from their sites or face censorship and prosecution. The content prohibited includes pornographic fiction available for online reading or download. Chinese censorship has been steadily growing and recently hit the headlines over clashes with internet giant Google.
Police have charged pop star Azril “Ariel” Irham with pornography offences for allegedly participating in home made sex tapes with two other Indonesian celebrities. The videos came to light after they were leaked on social networking sites Twitter and Facebook and have subsequently been widely circulated via mobile phones. Controversial Indonesian pornography laws prohibit public displays of flesh and behaviour that could incite lust and if convicted, Ariel faces a maximum sentence of 12 years imprisonment.
Steve Jobs wants the iPad, which goes on sale in the UK today, porn free. He’s said so. And unlike most people, he can make this sort of thing happen. Approval for Apple’s App store involves passing the censor — and the threshold is quite high: Germany’s Stern magazine recently failed because it runs topless photographs.
It’s not clear whether this just applies to visual porn — nor how this is defined. Are the works of the Marquis de Sade pornography? Will there be an iPad app for Last Exit to Brooklyn?
Well, no one has to buy the iPad or any other Apple product. So this seems to be fair enough. There are plenty of alternatives at the moment. Google, for example, in contrast to Apple seems committed to openness. But what if Apple grew and completely dominated the market? What if just about every e-book or e-magazine publisher chose to do exclusive deals with them? Suppose Apple decides on a whim that it’s not just porn they want to control but anything that might be deemed “offensive”? We’d end up with Steve Jobs or his successor as a de facto online censor, and self-censorship being the route to e-publication readable on the device everyone is using. Is this the future we want? Are we happy that Jobs is controlling iPad content so carefully already?