Apple Inc. removed podcast apps Pocket Casts and Castro from its App Store in China at the request of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the apps’ developers said this week.
“We believe podcasting is and should remain an open medium, free of government censorship,” Pocket Casts wrote on Twitter. “As such we won’t be censoring podcast content at their request.” The developers said that Apple contacted them on behalf of the Chinese regulator and that the app was removed two days later.
The developer wrote that Apple said Pocket Casts includes “content that is illegal in China as determined by the CAC.”
It turns out the developers behind these two small podcast applications have a stronger and bigger backbone than Apple – because Apple censored its own podcasts application when the Chinese government ordered them to.
As expected.
The modern, “trendy”, image of Apple only goes as far as not to tarnish their bottom line.
I do believe that if the Chinese government squeeze Apple a bit stronger, they will even make a marketing campaign praising the Chinese government and how liberal democracy and freedom as such outdated, boring, concepts, so to be cool you must be, praise daily your leaders with tears on your eyes and earn your social points.
Good for China. I think can countries have freedom of what applications for their people to use. This is important because misleading information, fake news, alternative facts are prevalent from western bloggers and western media, promoting their western democracy nonsense to countries they deemed as oppressive.
Countries must enjoy the same freedom as with democratic countries by crafting laws necessary without the west imposing their superior morals. Western countries bringing freedom and democracy will result in countries becoming warzones.
AER,
That’s a unique moral view, do you always put the government’s rights above it’s people’s? Where do you draw the line? What about North Korea and other dictators? What point, if any, do you believe the people’s rights trump the government’s demands?
Maybe you can blame the british for how they handled hong kong 23 years ago, but they’ve long since left. What’s happening today is a result of china fighting to take away peoples freedoms and democracy, not because the west is intervening. The “war” you see is being caused internally.
Thom Holwerda,
This is why walled gardens are so dangerous to our liberties.
BTW, haus, apple called, they’d like a defense!
I wonder if he’s gone, he hasn’t been back since I asked him to say one thing critical of apple…
http://www.osnews.com/story/131352/microsoft-stuffs-ads-in-the-windows-start-menu-targeting-firefox-users/#comment-10405805
Alfman,
Spot-on.
Let be frank, business must bow to the rules of the markets they want to be in, and China is a huge market with rising importance. It would be foolish to Apple to skip it. A possible solution, at least on this case, would be Apple Inc, on markets with such a level of state surveillance, to allow applications to be installed from realms outside of its direct control, like what is possible with Android, but we all know that Apple wouldn’t do it, don’t we?
acobar,
I know.
So you’re saying apple could make iphones that don’t impose restrictions for the chinese market? It seems clear to me apple doesn’t actually care about owner freedoms, so I very much doubt they would consider doing that. However it would be interesting to see that play out. I think other markets would start asking why china has unlocked iphones while more democratic countries end up with inferior locked iphones. The optics would be kind of weird. There would be undoubtedly be an increase in gray market iphones to get the unlocked version.
> increase in gray market iphones to get the unlocked version.
Except that the “unlocked versions” might have other things that people would consider “undesirable” – like snooping apps installed by default in some way that can’t be removed. Jailbreaking would be easier – at least up to an iPhone XS (A12).
Jimw338,
At least with an unlocked OS & bootloader you can install a clean image. With locked down phones you get what you get and there’s not much you can do about it. The reality is apple doesn’t care about our concerns and freedoms because they stand to loose loads of money.
Those smaller developers don’t have operations in China so the Chinese government cannot get them, so no backbone is really required, but the Chinese government can get Apple and their Store, like they got Google.
Thom, please try to understand the following: China is too big of a market to ignore. Google withdrew from China to avoid self-cencorship and the CEO who did that was replaced with another CEO immediately. Free trade sounds good and dandy in theory but in practice it gives dictatorships like the Chinese dictatorship one too much leverage when it comes to negotiating how other companies do business in the country and how much free speech they can provide, and free countries can’t strike back with import taxes for Chinese goods because free trade agreement.
kurkosdr,
You make a valid point. A counterpoint would be that if this continues, the long term effects of this form of censorship by proxy (using apple and other corporations) could result in more self-censorship where companies will be more inclined to comply with china because china pulls the strings at apple (and other large multinationals, etc).
I get that too. Many people will not criticize apple for complying with china, it’s the cost of doing business there… However the fact is that is the walled garden restrictions are apple’s own doing. Apple deserves blame for it’s part in engineering technology to intentionally repress owner freedoms. that fault lies squarely at apple’s feet. They don’t get the moral high ground here. As long as they continue to fight against owner rights, they are complicit in making the world more vulnerable to autocracy.
I agree Apple’s walled garden clashes badly with Chinese censorship btw.
Good for China. I think countries needs to have freedom of what applications for their people to use. This is important because misleading information, fake news, alternative facts are prevalent from western bloggers and western media, promoting their western democracy nonsense to countries they deemed as oppressive. Even among US politicians, ignorance is rampant and this is dangerous, since this is the same people who will craft laws that might affect other countries’ FREEDOM.
Countries must enjoy the same freedom as with democratic countries. Western countries bringing freedom and democracy will result in countries becoming warzones.
AER,
I wonder how you would feel right now if the OSAlert moderators decided to censor your post….
I don’t know why that hasn’t already been done. I don’t think I’ve ever seen posts that are such an obvious example of paid shilling on behalf of a totalitarian dictatorship, as AER’s are.
Why does China even have to ask Apple? Could China’s Great Firewall intercept App-Store-directed packets and simply deny requests for a particular app? Can the Firewall do Deep Packet Inspection, or does Apple add their own encryption to App Store requests?
I assume using HTTPS is illegal in China, or they’ve jiggered with the protocol to allow the Firewall to decrypt it. Or perhaps they have they’ve developed a top-secret 500-or-so-qubit quantum computer and have a few hundred thousand of them sitting in a basement somewhere.
Jimw338,
When encryption is used, a firewall can only block and grant an entire site. It isn’t possible to block specific resources.
I don’t know chinese laws, but I believe they prefer going after the websites and service providers themselves (as they’ve been doing with apple).