Apple, who recently denied and banned all flash apps from its line of products including iPhones and iPads, might be in the waters with feds for anti-competitive behavior:

The federal government is reportedly poking around Apple’s requirement that software developers only use its–or neutral–programming tools.
The New York Post reports that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are pondering an antitrust inquiry into Section 3.3.1 in Apple’s iPhone 4.0 software developer kit license agreement.

I think Apple has gone a bit too far as Flash is still an important part of our web browsing experience (until HTML5 is standardized and used everywhere).

Even I personally own an old Mac Powerbook that runs Ubuntu but I don’t use it because flash is not supported for my Powerbook’s line of CPUs.

HTML5 may be coming along rather rapidly but the percentage of flash sites that don’t support HTML5 are among the norm.

Even many renowned publishers like Wired and PCWorld are saying Jobs has gone way too far this time:

Don’t get me wrong: I think HTML5 is the future, too (eventually). I also believe poorly written Flash applications are the scourge of the Web. But I’ve also seen plenty of useful Flash apps, and they seem to be getting better. What’s wrong with giving users a choice?

It all boils down to one thing, a choice for the end-user to have flash or not.

The one thing I don’t understand is that Apple can easily put a “button” that can enable/disable flash so the user has a “choice” to enable it or disable it. There’s no good argument against this that Apple can simply ban flash altogether.

At least now it’s in the hands of the government to decided whether Apple is being a Nazi-camp.

Tags: anti-trust, apple, feds

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 10:34 am and is filed under apple.
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