Ingredients listed on food are provided so that people who have allergies can see what's in the food, and not die. In a universe where foods don't have to list ingredients, foods without the ingredient label will be cheaper, meaning allergic people have to pay more to find out what's in the food. Meaning that allergic people ("disabled", if you will) are forced to pay more because of a from-birth (or from-young-age) disadvantage through no fault of theirs.

I'm republican and libertarian as the day is long, but I support government regulation that puts this sort of disadvantaged people on equal footing with everyone else. That means elevators have to be in buildings, handicapped people should get free parking, learning disabled should get special classes in school, etc.

You can't be allergic to an iPhone app. Being open and transparent about an app market is one of those things that should be competitive advantage. Sprint or MS or whoever's building their app store should be able to say "Look at our app store, it's open! Come over here!" as a selling point even when their software stack is inferior (no flamewars please).

I'm an iPhone developer and I am pissed at apple. What they are doing is wrong and evil. But developers are perfectly capable of staging a coup and changing Apple's mind (we did with getting them to release the app store in the first place). I'm open to discussing why that doesn't happen (too many people are making too much money is my theory).

But what shouldn't happen is the government stepping in and saying "Too lazy to stand up for yourselves? Don't worry, we'll do it for you!" That's so dumb I don't even know where to begin. It sets an awful precedent. Software developers are fiery and passionate, generally speaking, and I've seen way too many professions lose that because they outsource their righteous indignation to their government, and then become dependent. And then there's regulation written for yesteryear affecting today's tech companies, and in about fifty years tech becomes the auto industry or the banking industry: one-brilliant people who gave their battles away to someone else to fight, and everybody paid the price for it.

Maybe that's a bit overdramatic for one government intervention. On the other hand, for want of a shoe...

Another example: the SEC is set up to help keep information equally spread within financial markets, and in fact its (perhaps inevitable) failure to keep up with new information asymmetries involving complex mortgage derivatives and credit default swaps contributed significantly to the recent economic collapse.

But we can disagree in each particular case about whether the government should be responsible for improving information flow, or whether consumers should carry the burden themselves. I am definitely in favor of as little regulation as possible to get the job done. I'm just saying that some information asymmetries are literally huge and there's not much consumers can be expected to do without government's help.

I'm not sure I view 'information asymmetries' in the same light. Clearly some information (like passphrases or source code) are asymmetrical by design, and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that. I'm "disabled" in the sense that I can't read SJ's e-mail; forcing him to open his inbox would probably be "leveling the playing field" for a lot of people, but none of this is unfairness or injustice. Quite the contrary, forcing his inbox open would be an injustice. Sure, there are cases when you're investigating something else and you need to, but there's warrants and process and all that. There's a fundamental understanding that it's very very bad and only if we absolutely have to.

Similarly, meddling in the app store, private property of apple, would be an injustice. Sure, I think it needs work; what apple's doing is meanspirited. But it's their sandbox, and they need to be the ones to clean up the mess. Boycotts, nonrenewing contracts, etc., all put legitimate pressure on a company, governments work with illegitimate pressure (which can be useful if something really really bad is happening. But that isn't this situation).

Now to the point. I think maybe you are misunderstanding what I mean by information asymmetry. Obviously there is a trade-off between the consumer's right to know and a company's or an individual's right to privacy. I don't think anyone would say it's ok to force SJ to open his inbox in order to have that information spread widely.

But there are times when the benefit of open information outweighs the cost imposed. And sometimes the only way to reliably eliminate information asymmetries is for the government to step in, because the free market isn't capable of self-imposed openness.

Consider cigarettes. No, I wasn't born with an inability to discover that cigarettes are highly addictive and likely cause lung cancer. I could have done a bunch of research and maybe run some experiments to determine those things. But before the landmark Surgeon General's warning in 1966 tobacco companies had pretty effectively suppressed that information. Things started to change when that warning was required on every pack of cigarettes so that every consumer was at least aware of the risks of smoking.

This is the kind of information asymmetry that the government (and you) should care about eliminating. When companies wield (political, economic, etc.) power to keep consumers in the dark. No we're not disadvantaged from birth, we're disadvantaged due to lack of resources. I think you'd be surprised how bad many aspects of our lives would be without government intervention in a lot of information asymmetry situations.

I don't think that "information asymmetry" is ever sufficient cause for government action. And I don't think "there is a trade-off between the consumer's right to know and a company's... right to privacy". That's a weak tautology, like saying "People shouldn't have to walk through metal detectors, and should still be perfectly safe in planes." It's vague enough to be agreeable without actually having said anything.

It's easy enough to look at the Hoover Dam and say "Look at this dam! Without government intervention this dam would not exist!" The fallacy is to suggest that the choice is between the hoover dam and nothing. In fact, it's the choice between the dam and where the money would have been spent. Was the hoover dam better than whatever the market could have done with the money? I don't know, but that's an extremely difficult position to argue--you have to argue against everything.

What you're saying is, basically, the government intervened to force companies to give us information. Is that good? I'm not so sure. We started (seriously, anyway) regulating the financial markets shortly after the great depression. Then the market got too complicated for the regulators, and it crashed, so we wrote more complicated regulation. Wash, rinse, repeat. There are still as many Madoffs today as there were in the 1890s--the only operative difference is that they've been regulated into a complexity that could potentially fool even me. Meanwhile startups are too scared to IPO, which is the secret cost everybody overlooks (what we would build with the hoover dam).

By and large, you still have the same percentage of bad apples. Information has simply inflated over the years. Still the same asymmetries, just a higher floor.

And what's really perverse about the whole thing--you see huge gains in the floor during the highest asymmetries. Think about the great economic booms--railroads, industrial revolution, even recently with MS Windows and/or Office. These are periods of huge economic growth, of technology raising everyone's standards of living. And they're the periods of patents, of lawsuits, anticompetiveness, and huge economic disparities.

At the risk of committing a huge causal fallacy, I posit that asymmetry, informational or otherwise, is necessary for these gains. Or at least more necessary than most of us feel comfortable with.

As for the rest of your comment I don't know. I guess we'll see. The tech community couldn't be more riled up then it is now (how many times have "I'm dropping Apple" posts made it to the front page of HN lately?). So if Apple does eventually change their policy than maybe you're right. If not I think you should reconsider your objection to limited Government intervention.

See, it could be much more riled up than it is. For one, developers could pull their apps from the store. That 50,000 figure Apple published ages ago could be 5,000. If Tapulous or one of the iPhone developers that Apple babies pulled their apps in protest, I guarantee it would keep Steve Jobs awake at night.

Google could stop handing macbooks to each new recruit. They could refuse to serve maptiles to future phones.

Front-page posts on HN, while I admit are more meaningful than Reddit or Digg or someplace, are chump change on the thermometer of developer outrage. All anyone's done so far about this is write passioned rants and maybe threaten to not buy any new macs personally.

The examples you give are never, EVER going to happen. Developers aren't going to pull their applications from the most popular computing environment just to prove a point. Nor are companies like Google going to change their whole computing environment just to prove a point. It would be corporate misconduct to flush all that money down the toilet just to prove some point to Apple that has nothing to do with your actual business.

So if we accept the actions needed for the public to make Apple change are not things that will ever happen the question is "As a society are we willing to just accept this injustice?" If your answer to that question is "Yes" that's perfectly valid. But if your answer is "No" then it requires government intervention.

Again, keep in mind, we aren't talking about forcing Apple to change their terms. Just to get them to publicly define them so developers don't waste months developing applications that may or may not be accepted.

But see, I don't accept that premise. For one thing, the CEO of Google just quit the Apple board, which I read as a little more than just "Too many meetings I can't take part of." For another thing, people aren't blindly loyal (except to themselves, perhaps). A mac wasn't the first computer you ever bought. An iPhone wasn't the first phone you ever made calls on. You woke up one day and decided to purchase one or both. Tomorrow you can wake up and decide to buy into another platform.

Sure, there's some friction. But that is largely for good reason. GV or no, the iPhone is better by and large than most other phones. Macs are (in some people's view, anyway) by and large better than most other computers. If they cease to become as good (or if their competitors become better), Apple will lose business. It's the same as anybody else.

> As a society are we willing to just accept this injustice?"

This is the wrong question. First of all, what's happened is not an "injustice". It might be meanspirited and in bad faith, but injustice is what happens when people are denied their rights. And "we" as "society" are not in the position to decide anything, except whether or not we want an iPhone, and whether or not we want to develop for it. Two years ago the app store didn't exist, nobody put apps on their phones. Now, everybody seems to think it's a god-given right and it has to be run a certain way. There's absolutely nothing illegal about what Apple's doing.

The government can't (and shouldn't) dictate the way it's run any more than they can dictate the plot of a Harry Potter book. Wildly popular, prosperous to many, contentious, and ultimately the product of someone's mind.

Besides, how would you do it? There's no breach of contract; developers sign a document that says that Apple can reject apps for any reason (all the rejections that I've seen actually point to a reason in the contract, which is not, technically speaking, required). The FCC's jurisdiction might extend to protecting jailbreakers, but not what software Apple allows in their own store (and certainly not to iPod Touches). I suppose Congress could increase the breathtakingly-wide interstate commerce clause, but 70% of the apps are free, which I think would give even the most expansionist observer pause. Plus you have to ponder what random nonsense would end up in the bill.

No, if there's anything to be done, Apple has to see enough pressure to change. With Google and Apple in divorce proceedings, it would be perfectly reasonable to stop serving map tiles when the contract's up. Already you see the signs: Latitude can't be a native app, GV can't be a native app, how much ad revenue does Google get from serving Youtube to phones again? That relationship's going to get sour fast.

The CEO of Google quitting the Apple board is way different from what you describe. The actions you described would cost companies thousands if not millions of dollars and that's not going to happen.

Injustice is the denial of justice and justice is defined as "the quality of being just or fair". Denying people their rights is an injustice but only because it's unfair to do it. In the end the issue is still fairness.

Again, you use the example of dictating the plot of a Harry Potter book as why the Government shouldn't intervene. But that would be the Government telling a company HOW to run. I specifically said this isn't about that. It's about making the company define how they interact with the public. A better analogy would be the government making it illegal to put the cover of the new Harry Potter book on copies of older ones to sell copies (which in fact is illegal)

You're confusing fairness with equality. Apple isn't being equal--it's treating some developers differently than others. But it's certainly being fair--following the terms it laid out in the SDK agreement.

This isn't about "making the company define how they interact with the public". Developers aren't the public. We're talking about publishing terms between developers and apple, and consumers only enter into the picture as an (albiet necessary) third party.

It's mostly the app store developers that are setting themselves up for trouble because of this.

So that should read 'if developers don't like Apples practices regarding the App store they are free to go elsewhere', only there is no 'elsewhere', the only way to the Iphone leads through the app store.

Don't like their rules? Don't play on their lawn.

I ask because those laws set a precedent of using Government intervention to make sure private industries treat people fairly. So if you are in favor of those laws you have to ask yourself if it's fair for some developers to be forced to develop on platforms with 30 million fewer customers.

ask yourself if it's fair for some developers to be forced to develop on platforms with 30 million fewer customers

You didn't just seriously draw a line between those two statements, did you? Moreover please show me a developer who is forced to develop anything for any platform.

So the question at hand is fairness not racism. Which brings me back to my original point of "Should the government legislate whether private industries treat people fairly?"

The app-store is a digital retail store. You are free to develop an iPhone app and offer it to them. They are free to reject it.

Just like you are free to develop a better mousetrap and offer it to WalMart - and they are free to reject it.

If you don't like their rules then don't develop an iPhone app. It's really as simple as that.

And in case you are wondering what their rules are: They are explained in this big blob of text presented to you when you sign up. The one with the checkbox labeled "I understand and I agree" at the end.

In truth it's exactly the same thing you just refuse to see it because you're so set in your opinion.

A transparent approval process would solve this instantly.

And even Apple would benefit.

You are mistaken, the official rulebook is published and it's right there in the blurb that you agree to during sign up.

It's really short, too, as there is only one rule: Apple decides whether an app is accepted and they will neither tell you the criteria nor the reasons for a rejection.

If you don't agree with that then you should not tick that checkbox. Easy, huh?

I find that hard to believe. I think a rulebook does exist, but that they avoid publishing it because they want to have the 'final say' even if somebody would play within the rules as specified in the book.

And that makes sense, because it would open apple up to being sued for breach of contract, and that is exactly what this whole thing is about. A one-sided contract is no contract, consideration is to be given to both parties. Developing an application is an investment and you should be allowed to inspect the full terms of the contract under which you make your investment.

Excuse me? I said nothing like that.

Yes, they probably have an internal rulebook but that's completely irrelevant because they chose to not disclose it. They are free to make that choice, just like you are free to not do business with them on these terms. It's called "Free Market", wikipedia can tell you more.

A one-sided contract is no contract, consideration is to be given to both parties

I'm starting to think you have serious reading comprehension problems. The contract is not one-sided. You get to read it and you must agree to it.

Developing an application is an investment and you should be allowed to inspect the full terms of the contract under which you make your investment.

You are not only allowed to inspect the full terms, you are required to inspect and agree to the full terms.

The full terms are: Apple may or may not accept your application and they are not obliged to tell you any reasons for their decision.

If you think apple "should" be operating differently then don't do business with them.

You seem to think there is some sort of godgiven right to get into the App store. There is not. It is Apple's personal playground. If they choose to accept apps only on mondays then they are free to do so. If they choose to reject apps because they would compete with their own products then they are free to do so. If they choose to reject apps without even telling you the reason then they are free to do so.

They have this freedom because you, the developer, checked that little "I agree"-checkbox, remember?

"...Waiver of Rights: I have read and understand that I hereby waive for the duration of my travel authorization obtained via ESTA any rights to review or appeal of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer's determination as to my admissibility, or to contest, other than on the basis of an application for asylum, any removal action arising from an application for admission under the Visa Waiver Program. ..." [ https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/ ]

So, the way I understand, the "American Way" is forcing transparency from everyone, as long as it's not me? How is Apple any different?

Why not also whine about how your local cinema refuses to show your home movie!

If you don't like something why don't you try just clicking away.

Edit: And for those down voting this comment I say the same thing to you: Just click away for God's sakes. There are almost 50 comments here so clearly people want to discuss this. Let Them! Just ignore it and move on to topics you're interested in. Stop trying to control what other people are allowed to do.

... as soon as Apple and AT&T deliver phone service without using any public infrastructure. As long as they want to use the public airwaves, though, the public should have some oversight into what goes on.

(Remember, "the big bad government" isn't telling them what to do, the people that own the infrastructure, us, are telling them what to do. It's just that the process is very, very indirect.)

Apple and AT&T do have government-granted privileges (such as limited liability and the huge swath of regulations which assist larger and existing corporations against their customers and smaller competitors), but regulations for and against don't "balance"; handing someone a candy bar does not give you the right to tell them what to do.

Sure, but radio spectrum (which is what the OP meant by "infrastructure") is owned by the government and licensed to corporations subject to public good and review isn't it?

(pS: I don't have a dog in this fight. I've never used Apple Hardware or software and never will. So I don't really care what Apple does. Where I live Apple is a very very minor player anyway. Just trying to confirm my knowledge of how radio spectrum is owned and allotted).

OK, let's stop giving away candy bars then. What's in it for me?

I can see the argument that developers for the App Store are akin to contractors for Apple, but I don't believe that's the case either.

If the developers really want government involvement, the first step WOULD NOT BE regulation, rather it should be arbitration. The slighted developers have the courtrooms available to them, and potentially have contract dispute claims they could file suit on. (I don't know, I don't develop for the iPhone at all.) If they don't, then they've obviously entered into a one-sided contract they shouldn't have, and shame on them. That said, there might also be a claim for that as well. One of the primary tenets for contract law is that there is mutual consideration -- a contract without mutual consideration can often be considered valueless on its face. I am uncertain whether or not the potential for profit by app store sales counts or not, honestly.

"Companies who create computing environments that are not open to all applications must clearly define the acceptance criteria for developers wishing to create applications for those environments"

I guess there will always be some ambiguity (What's "clearly " for example) but anything is an improvement over what we have now.

I don't see why government needs to be brought into this. Do we really need a "computing platform fairness czar"?

Does Apple have a monopoly that is preventing free and open trade? Perhaps. If so, government has a role to provide an open, honest shot for smartphone developers (and more so for end-consumers) This is because monopolies distort markets, which hurts everybody. But it's important to realize that for 99.9% of cases, having control over your platform, sales, and marketing channels is a good thing for everybody involved.

Should government enforce food labeling? Sure thing, because folks can't make an honest determination of what they're buying unless the contents are clearly labeled. This is back to the free and open market idea.

Should government step in anytime somebody (even a majority) think something is "unfair"? Not so much. People think all kinds of things are fair or unfair, and such distinctions are very emotional.

The key question is whether or not the iPhone is distorting the free and open market for smartphone apps. I think we have a long way to go before we cross that line. Right now it's more a matter of Apple doing wonderfuly well and holding their cards close as to what they want to allow on their platform. But there are a lot of choices out there for app developers and consumers. And the worse Apple acts, the more the market will punish it.

I'm a developer who's thinking about writing some smartphone apps. With all the publicity, I've decided that the iPhone platform isn't for me. Over time, if enough developers feel the same way, there'll be more apps not on the platform than on it. Apple has to be smart enough to see this as a problem, so I think things will be self-correcting.

We're dealing with platforms -- large systems to which people commit their data. We're also dealing with a two-faced community: developers and consumers. It's going to take a lot more than unfair developer treatment to get many people to switch away from iTunes.

Apple generally makes excellent products; combine that with the iTunes ecosystem to get a combo bonus. People aren't likely to switch to a platform they perceive as inferior; Apple won't drop the ball on creating good combinations of hardware and software any time soon. Even if a superior product arrives, consumers must commit to migrating their applications, data, music, etc.

It's going to take a lot more than a restrictive and unfair developer platform to get the market to correct itself. Look at the Windows Vista debacle: despite many unhappy consumers, I don't see a whole lot of people switching away for that reason alone. Anecdotally, the only time I see people switch away from Windows is when they're enticed by buying a Mac instead -- and they cite Apple's software more often than Windows's flaws.

There's also a case to be made, which is made by every monopoly, that having a single player actually advances things in the public interest. In other words, by having Apple control so much, the future of smartphones in general is actually advanced much farther than if they didn't. I don't buy this argument as a general rule, but parts of it do seem to make sense. After all, getting 40 individual players to agree on a standard is a lot harder than getting one company to do so.

Perhaps the natural state of the technology industry is to slowly swing between monopolies and openness. During times of monopolies, de facto standards get adopted and interfaces stabilized. During times of openness, innovation rules and paradigm changes are made.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, just that it looks like a pattern might be setting up.

We are where we want to be. The poster asked the question of should government intervene. To say that "government will intervene whether we want to or not" is to engage in circular reasoning. One supposes that in order to ask the question, there must be a choice for the answerer to make.

I also have heard this "those were the old times" argument quite a bit lately, and its wearing thin for me. To some degree, yes, government has intervened and mucked around with markets. But to a larger degree it hasn't. And the decision to muck around or not, last I checked, was a political one, not done simply because times have changed. It's very much debatable whether government intervention in various markets constitute a good or bad thing.

Teddy was a smart man. So was Jefferson. We continue to find and address these issues as we can, doing the best with what light we have.

laissez-faire

You are comparing the nations food supply ... with iphone applications...

...

You could easily trivialize this by suggesting that the food supply is a critical resource, but if a company gets large enough to employ a bunch of people living in Apples 'eco-system' and Apple decides to pull the plug the results for those people are quite comparable to eating something bad. In both cases there are people that have no way of knowing what is going on 'under water' whose health and well being depends on being informed.

To ask for that information is the only right thing to do.

Consumers don't have the power to bend a large corporation to their will, but the government can do that.

I'm not saying I know what's best for anyone. Rather, it's just not the American/Capitalistic way. And Americans, they like their Capitalism.

It's about whether it is right to have a platform that is closed without specifying clearly and unambiguously what the rules are for access to that platform.

Imagine you're an Iphone developer, you build your application, you get it accepted. Business is good. Then you hire some more people and you improve your application. Business is even better. Sooner or later you have an office full of people, and then one day your application gets rejected. Not only that, you'll have to pay back to the users that bought your application what they paid for it.

And all this without so much as an explanation why or a public rulebook where you could see for yourself why you were not in the clear.

Capitalism or the American way does not enter in to it. Think about a real-world analogy (and which like all analogies is broken) where the toll-keeper on a road would decide retroactively that the goods that you transported on their road did not meet their criteria, and that you have to reverse your business for the last N months, without any recourse on your part.

I bring up Capitalism because this is about business. All of your points are rock-solid data points of why NOT to do business with Apple's App store. Yet developers insist.

I am going start a company that manufactures pagers. Is this a bad business decision? Maybe ... Is it my choice ... yes...

Of course there's a difference. Your point is about retroactively pulling the plug for no disclosed reason. I get that - but again all the more reason that its a bad business decision.

I think I'm more worried about the 'domino' effects of these arbitrary decisions.

Independent software developers ('the guy in the attic') are probably fairly aware of the legal position they place themselves in when they develop for the iphone (though by the recent spate of postings I'm beginning to doubt even that).

But if you were employed by a company making the above sample iphone app it would be your ass on the line, not your boss'.

If you believe Apple should be required to list its requirements for applications, then you should also believe that governments should be required to list their requirements for corporations.

That is all.

Full disclosure of terms is a must I think, and a very rigorous process should be in place to handle these situations.

I firmly believe that even though the app store is clearly apples creation with great power comes great responsibility.

And when companies do not live up to their responsibilities (I think Apple has proven beyond reasonable doubt that they act in an arbitrary way) then they ought to be forced to do so.

People build their businesses on top of the Iphone app store ecosystem and they should have a reasonable expectation that their investment is not subject to some arbitrary action of Apple.

If Apple does not want that kind of oversight they have a simple solution available to them: Open up the app store for everybody and drop the review process other than to look for stuff that I would loosely class as 'malware'.

If your application is merely stupid, trivial or has been done a million times already that should not disqualify you. Even 'disgusting' stuff should be possible, who is apple to define what is disgusting and what is not.

As long as applications stay within the law there should be room for them in the App store, the only thing Apple could do to protect its brand in this respect is to categorize the applications or to cut the app store loose from the mother ship.

They're in a tight spot on this one, damned if they do and damned if they don't. The 'apple knows best' strategy is backfiring big time.