Look, I generally agree with Steve. I have no serious problem with how he runs the app store. I think he's providing something that his customers want.
But are you telling me parental controls -- i.e. software to restrict the freedom of children -- should in any way be called freedom? For better or worse, restricting people is not freedom. What I'm saying is it's perverse to use words to mean their opposites.
And BTW, as you surely know, porn apps are restricted in the app store. He thinks that is a way of protecting users from porn. It may well be the right decision, but protecting people from themselves is not increasing freedom.
There are two kinds of freedom. To bring up a different subject:
There is the freedom to allow you to install Flash.
There is also the freedom from the burden of Flash.
My great fear about allowing Adobe to install Flash on the iPhone is that we will, again, be stuck with a buggy de facto standard with rebellion only in designer/developer websites while the big sites still use Flash. Forcing HTML5 forces competition in a much needed area (web video), even when it's competing devices that allows only one or the other.
By all means vote with your wallet and buy something that frees and empowers you. While you might not like it, I personally like Steve's freedoms.
Minors don't have the same freedoms as adults, that's simply a social reality - they can't vote, can't drink, can't purchase cigarettes, can't enter into contracts, etc. Parental controls help protect a parent's freedom to raise their children as they see fit.
I'm not claiming that the porn app restriction is increasing people's freedom. I'm claiming that when Jobs refers to "freedom from porn", he's referring to blocking the malicious pornographic adware that plagues exploited Windows machines, and providing effective parental controls.
So why can't an adult install a porn app, to use this lame red herring? Why can't there be a parental control giving the parent the decision of whether or not to install porn? Why couldn't there be an alternative to the App Store, where you can buy a porn app, but simply have a parental control to disable access to apps not from the App Store? The power over the decision of which content is appropriate lies with the parents, not with the platform vendor.
Fine, there should be porn in the App Store, whatever. I'm just pointing out that it's stupid to act like Jobs was trying to say "you have more freedom because we prevent you from looking at porn".
I would guess the parents who want to use parental controls see it as the freedom to raise their children in a certain way. Though in reality it's probably more about satisfying the parents own sense of responsibility to protect their children. Either way it's fairly well established that minors have a different set of freedoms and rights than adults. The US constitution itself grants different freedoms and rights based on age. Minimum ages for elected office for example. Other laws, upheld by the supreme court, restrict access to pornography by age. Are we going to hold a consumer electronics company more accountable than the US government?
But are you telling me parental controls -- i.e. software to restrict the freedom of children -- should in any way be called freedom? For better or worse, restricting people is not freedom. What I'm saying is it's perverse to use words to mean their opposites.
And BTW, as you surely know, porn apps are restricted in the app store. He thinks that is a way of protecting users from porn. It may well be the right decision, but protecting people from themselves is not increasing freedom.