Apple's iPad could be game-changer in digital-media censorship
I live in a country (France) where censorship is a big deal. It comes mostly from greedy celebrities; they use a legal system that largely favors them. Often, they find a compassionate judge to rule on the issue …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after Jobs unveiled the iPad as an eBook reader meant to rival Amazon's Kindle, the device is collecting a second wave of scrutiny on top of the Flash fight with Adobe and what industry figures have already called a tsunami of excessive criticism. The Free Software Foundation framed the stakes early, arguing the iPad is iBad for freedom because a closed appliance puts one vendor between readers and text.
The Washington Post column extends that argument from software freedom to law: it is opinion, not established fact — the author speculates that in France, where celebrity-driven litigation already bends media coverage, a single-company distribution channel gives courts a clean enforcement point. The claim is unconfirmed, but it lands on a real structure: the iPad's app-and-book model concentrates approval authority in Cupertino.
First-order effects
- Apple, by approving every book and application sold through its storefront, becomes the practical address for any takedown demand — a French court order aimed at 'the publisher' now has a single chokepoint to hit instead of scattered websites.
Second-order effects
- Rival e-reader ecosystems such as Amazon's Kindle face pressure to define their own editorial and legal-review policies, since a distributor seen as censor-friendly inherits the reputational cost; authors and small French publishers gain both a new risk (removal) and a new lever (litigate against the store, not each site).
Third-order effects
- If national legal systems learn to route censorship demands through device and storefront owners, digital-media control shifts from policing individual publications to regulating a handful of gatekeepers — exactly the concentration the Free Software Foundation warned about, and the pattern that tends to draw antitrust and regulator attention to platform holders like Apple.
The trend: Digital reading is consolidating into vendor-controlled appliance-plus-storefront models, moving censorship enforcement from distributed websites to single corporate gatekeepers.