from the hip

Most European countries have experiences with totalitarian regulation. Censorship was implemented during World War Two in Germany and all German occupied territories by the Nazis. Italy had the same under Mussolini. And in Eastern Europe it was in place until the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet dominated communist states were smashed and censorship was finally abandoned.

Today we witness a new kind of totalitarianism. This time implemented by men unknown in the corporate offices of the American corporations Google and Apple. Behind closed doors executives of these two corporations have decided that American moral standards must be imposed all over the globe. Rarely, if ever, have we witnessed more self-righteous and cultural imperialist corporate decisions than these.

Apple has decided to block what it considers “objectionable content” from being shown on iPhone. And “objectionable content” here refers to nudity. Completely ignoring the fact that moral standards differ considerably from country to country in the world, it is, of course, American moral standards that are the ones being implemented – standards which most Europeans consider completely silly. No nude legs, breasts, bodies, or – heaven forbid – female nipples can be shown on an iPhone. Despite the fact that European newspapers and magazines – Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, French, and so on and so forth – bring such photos all the time and nobody raises even an eyebrow.

And Google has actually done the same thing for a long time without being explicit about it. If you look at some of the posts in this blog that contains beautiful pictures of women – perhaps even showing their nipples – you will notice that the content of the Google ads disappear (as a matter of fact, all images shown on this site have also been published in European newspapers and magazines). It is the same on millions of websites all over the world. And what defines what is appropriate and what is not? The views predominant in the country where the website is located? The views common in the country of the person looking at the blog or magazine article? No! You guessed it! The American puritan moral standards!

I don’t know why corporations feel they ought to use technology this way. And I certainly don’t know how to stop it. I do know that I am appalled by it. And I hope the EU or some international organization will put an end to corporate censorship and cultural imperialism. We don’t need it. We don’t want it.

PS: See also:

• The excellent article about this in New York Times: In Germany, a Nude IS No Big Deal, Except on an iPhone, in today’s paper, page B4.
• Gizmodo.com: It is time to declare war against Apple’s censorship
• Apple discussion forum about “Is censorship really needed” – which has strangely been closed for comments
• Cult of Mac: Apple censorship reaches new levels of stupidity
• Seth Finkelstein: Google Censorship – how it works
• See the censored version of “Nudity in Art” at YouTube

I have downloaded and  tested Chrome. It is fast, has a number of great features, and looks great. However, it has bugs!

Chrome is not fully CSS and HMTL compliant. Like Internet Explorer it does not display all settings like they should be displayed. For instance, Chrome does not take into consideration “max-width” and “min-width” settings. This means that web pages that are fluid, but has set max and min widths so as to limit line widths will not display properly.

There may be other bugs as well, but those were the ones I noted.

This means that web programmers now have to find and implement “fixes” and “hacks” for yet another non-compliant web browser if they want pages to display properly.

Ouch!!

PS (January, 2010): I have recently tested Chrome again. As far as I can see, all the bugs I noticed have now been fixed.