Apple censorship

It's been an institution for decades: Almost daily Germany's Bild newspaper presents a naked woman on its front page. Sex sells for Germany's best-selling tabloid and needless to say "Bild-Girls," as they are known, are a main attraction of the paper's new iPhone application.

Users can shake their iPhone to slowly undress the models. However, the virtual Bild-Girls are much more modest than their paper counterparts; a slinky bikini is the most viewers will ever see in the virtual version of Bild.

One could call this self-censorship. The taming of the Bild-Girls comes at a time when Apple has banned thousands of iPhone applications that feature sexually suggestive material. In Germany, Apple's "no-nipples"-policy has triggered a debate that goes much further than whether it is tasteless to undress a virtual model or not.

German publishers are up in arms over the California company's censorship policies. The question at stake is whether a provider of technical infrastructure should be allowed to interfere with the content offered via its platform.

Apple says it reacts to complaints

"Today it may just be the rejection of too much nudity," said Wolfgang Fuerstner, director of the Organization of German Magazine Publishers. "But in the future this could go much further to where Apple simply blocks all content they don't like."

Apple has justified its actions and stated that the company has reacted to complaints from app store users.

"It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see," Philip W. Schiller, head of worldwide product marketing at Apple told the New York Times.

Playboy and Sports Illustrated not affected

According to analyst Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray "Apple has a brand to maintain."

"The bottom line is they want that image to be squeaky clean," he told the New York Times in an interview.

Munster estimated that about 5 percent of the over 140,000 apps in the App Store are sex related.

But even after Apple's ban, iPhone and iPod Touch are not 100 percent family friendly. Through the pre-installed Safari browser, users – including kids - can easily access the internet and the millions of websites that contain pornography and violence.

And while banning thousands of less prominent applications that contain nudity, the apps of Playboy and Sports Illustrated are still online. It is this alleged arbitrary way of deciding, which worries German publishers. They now want to push Apple to implement more transparent rules.

For Wolfgang Fuerstner Apple's reaction will determine to what extent Germany's news media will work together with the Californian company.

"I cannot think of anyone who will accept Apple setting the conditions for editorial freedom," he told Deutsche Welle. "No one will sell the right of freedom of the press to a company."

Author: Benjamin Hammer
Editor: Mark Mattox