Greetings. One of the key elements that the purveyors of censorship often want in their arsenal is secrecy. It isn't enough to ban particular materials, it's also extremely convenient to obscure or completely hide the mechanisms by which censorship is performed, and to keep hidden from public view the lists of items that are banned. After all, if you know in detail what's banned, you might become even more interested in them, or try to use this knowledge to work around the prohibitions.

Of course, such secrecy has another particularly diabolical effect as well -- it allows for the easy banning of materials in nonsensical, arbitrary, error-prone, or completely inappropriate ways, even when judged under the official terms of whatever censorship regime is currently in force.

In the Internet realm, we see all of these effects in the worlds of content filtering, both privately operated and government mandated. The "family jewels" of most Internet filtering systems are the secret lists of banned sites -- for the revelation of these can easily reveal sites that have been inappropriately blocked.

The other related element of secrecy -- obscuring the process through which censorship decisions are made -- is often equally important to preserving censored environments.

This latter aspect comes into direct play in the controversies over Apple's dictatorial control over iPhone and iPod applications. The removal from the Apple app store of an obnoxious "baby shaking" game after protests, has brought into the spotlight the arbitrary, secretive, contradictory, and seemingly nonsensical aspects of Apple's application approval process. Of particular note are the implications that Apple is especially sensitive about any applications that might offend anyone in a current political context.

We're brought inevitably to the question of why Apple should be playing application approval God for these devices in the first place, especially in a manner where the approval or rejection process is anything but transparent or open to scrutiny.

Contrast this with Google's attitude toward their Android OS and G1 phone, where not only can virtually any application be posted in the Android Market immediately without prior approval, but users can choose to install whatever apps they wish directly to their phones and bypass the Market completely in an entirely private manner.

I know of only two applications that have been pulled from universal access on the Android Market -- one involving PC tethering over T-Mobile, and the other the capturing of YouTube videos -- both of which can perhaps arguably be viewed as violating specific terms of service related to the cellular carrier and YouTube themselves. Notably, both of these applications continue to be available for download directly to Android phones from non-Market sites, and while it is supposedly theoretically possible for them to do so, Google has not made any attempts that I am aware of to disable their use.

In essence, Apple's iPhone/iPod application ecosystem has the elements of being designed for "children" who need to be controlled and guided in every aspect of their interactions with the devices, while Google's view is that users are generally adults who are best able to make their own decisions in these regards.

Would protests cause Google to ban a "baby shaker" application from Android Market? I don't know the answer to that, but since such an app could be installed by any G1 owners without using the Market in any case, the question has a wholly different significance than it would in Apple's tightly controlled iPhone/iPod application environment.

Apparently there are well over a hundred iPhone/iPod apps that are oriented toward farting and have passed successfully through Apple's application approval process -- yet a countdown clock to Obama's inauguration was banned, with Steve Jobs chiming in on that particular ban to say that he didn't see any point in "offending" people.

The world of censorship is a Bizarro World indeed.

--Lauren--