iPhone Web Claims Draw Governmental Rebuke in UK

Wills writes "Apple has been running an iPhone ad saying 'all parts of the internet are on the iPhone', but it had to be withdrawn after Britain's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that it gave 'a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone' because the iPhone cannot access Flash or Java – features that are essential to some websites. This raises an interesting issue of where do you draw the line between essential and non-essential features of websites. What should the web look like? Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?"

Comments

What about NNTP? P2P?

[oldspewey]

Knowing nothing about iPhone I have to ask, can it run a newsreader client? p2p client?

Re:Who misses flash?

[Abreu]

However, as much as we hate Flash and Java based websites, some people can't live without them for some reason...

I have to side with the British Authority on this one

parts... but not the whole internet

[protonbishop]

Plus it doesn't do mouseover/hover/tooltips -- pretty basic javascript. It's a cool device, but I find I have to re-engineer my websites to fit the iPhone's capabilities. Sure, the web may morph so that it will fit onto the iPhone, but for now I agree with the original article.

Re:Huh ?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was exactly my response to the summary. It sounds like someone is trying to manufacture a government-versus-internet debate when the issue is actually about false advertising.

Re:Confusion

[Crispy Critters]

"The ad repeatedly says you can get the whole 'internet', not just the web."

This is certainly OT, but it annoys me to no end when hotels do the same thing. "Wireless High Speed Internet!" -- when all they allow is web access. Believe it or not, some people care more about port 22 than about port 80. I guess if I were in the UK, I could sue.

The Apple case has some ambiguity. What is "access"? What constitutes "the internet"? Is it still the internet without Java? Maybe. Is it still the internet if it is restricted to the web? NO.

Re:Who misses flash?

[smooth wombat]

there are some sites where it is required.

See the OP's corrected comment about horribly designed sites. No site should require Flash to be used. None. As I stated in my journal a while back, my mutual fund company thought it would be uber kewl to have a Flash front page without an easy, secure, way to access ones account information. It didn't matter that Flash has been shown to be insecure, they used it.

Fortunately, after some gentle cattle-prodding, they've mended their ways and now have an easy (and secure) way to bypass Flash when logging in.

Flash is evil. It is comparable to the blink tag. It breaks standards, slows systems (like java) and developers use it in the most inane places (Dilbert anyone?). Sites which require you to install Flash should be swept from the inter-tubes and repeatedly, and with great prejudice, be burned on the scrapheap of failed web interfaces.

Re:Is it the fault of Apple or Adobe?

[TheRaven64]

While my MBP is in for repair, I'm back on my PowerBook. It has a 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 CPU, and yet is not capable of playing the iPlayer flash videos without dropping frames. Downloading the H.264 version and playing them with VLC gives around the same picture quality and uses well under 50% of the CPU.

I'd have thought that video would be something Flash should do well. Presumably they're just calling native code to handle the decoding, rather than writing the entire CODEC in ActionScript (that said, I've seen video CODECs written in Smalltalk running quite nicely in Squeak).

Re:Confusion

[tepples]

For vast majority of the population, e-mail & web browser is what the internet is. [...] Apple doesn't make any specific claims that it can run Flash, Java, Silverlight, RealMedia, or

Webkinz.com requires SWF, yet it's still not called Flashkinz. This shows that end users think "web browser" includes an SWF player, or at least the ability to install one.

The UK government DOES make that decision

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

Whilst the summary's nothing more than a troll (as everyone else has said, the ASA isn't a government authority) there is at least one area where it mandates something in this area - website presentation. It's in the "Disability Discrimination Act 1995":

(1) It is unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled personâ"

(a) in refusing to provide, or deliberately not providing, to the disabled person any service which he provides, or is prepared to provide, to members of the public;

The link to the text of the law is here:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1995/ukpga_19950050_en_4#pt3-pb1-l1g19

It's usually interpreted as forcing web sites to be compatible with screen readers (used by the blind) and high contrast / large character screen modes (used by the partially sighted).

It'd be interesting to see what would happen if someone who relied on a screen reader decided to take a service provider who didn't provide an accessible mode to court. If it meant that more sites had a more easily accessible "just the text, please" mode I'd welcome it.

It's worth mentioning that Adobe apparently do have a go at making Flash content potentially accessible:
http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flashplayer/

Re:Confusion

[Sancho]

Yeah, I'm still pissed that I can't use WoW on my iPhone. It says it supports the whole Internet!

Puffery

[swid27]

Surprised this hasn't been brought up yet...

Does anyone know if UK law has puffery defined in its trade laws, and if so, the extent (if any) allowed?

I presume that puffery protected Apple from similar problems here in the States.

implication is important

[crmarvin42]

I think that the problem here stems from what Apple thought people would interpret the phrase "whole internet" to mean. They probably thought it implied that you get the regular internet, not the red-headed step child of the internet that most web enabled phones get (Not talking about most smart phones here). That claim is fairly well founded. The group that made the ruling (not the government according to some here) had a different interpretation of that line. The question is which was is more acurate for the most people (us geeks not withstanding).

Re:Confusion

[Random BedHead Ed]

Supply and demand have in fact decided that many sites require flash

I see your point about supply and demand. Nevertheless I don't see how the accessibility of Flash-heavy sites (even though there are a lot of them out there) should be taken as contradicting the phrase "all parts of the Internet." If we approach it that way, any 64-bit Linux distro wouldn't be able to access "all parts of the Internet" because they don't have a compatible Flash plugin either. Heck, the Olympics site is a very prominant site and so is the Democratic Convention site, and both of them (and a smattering of others) require Silverlight, which doesn't have a full implementation on even 32-bit Linux, but I'd hardly call my Ubuntu laptop an Internet loser. And the Wii uses Opera on Linux, which probably gets the shaft from a lot of crappy banking sites that boot non-Windows UserAgents. Should Nintendo be barred from claims of access to the whole Internet?

Again, I acknowledge your point about Flash's unfortunate popularity, and I'd add to it that Apple's use of the broad term "Internet" as a substitute for the more specific "Web" is silly (on that note, I love people's comments on the fact that the claim is technically inaccurate if the iPhone excludes the gopher protocol). But there are a lot of devices and OSes out there that can't access every single bit of content on the Web. I don't see how this sort of exclusion helps informed consumers.

flash? *shudder*

[jpellino]

Flash has become the 4-cyl Hummer of the information superhighway. I don't want to sit behind a lumbering behemoth. I want info. I want it at a reasonable speed. I don't want to head over to some site and find out that it takes several minutes to get through what they want you to see and are patting themselves on the back for creating. speedtest.net is a great example of this. And very ironical. A minute of gratuitous painfully slow flash animation to get to run a 10 sec test of my connection speed. Just give me a list and let me click it.

If Flash went away tomorrow it would be no great loss and speed up the web user experience significantly.

Java however is a puzzlement for iPhone. My low-end Motorola L2 can run it - Apple should have had this done eons ago.

Thanks for clearing that up.

[uvajed_ekil]

Thanks, Apple. I was not under the impression that internet = WWW, but now I know I was wrong. Apple would never mislead me with their marketing claims, would they?

Re:Confusion

[Ilgaz]

Also we Symbian/Opera and J2ME/Opera Mini users have been experiencing the "real internet" for ages. We didn't even get boost from "Opera version" of sites, it is just some clever ones sent the mobile optimised version.

An Opera on a high end Symbian handset like Nokia N95 or E90 won't be different from the desktop version in any manner. I can't think of any sites which will degrade in functionality. Java is a different thing, the desktop java is still to heavy for mobile devices so they run J2ME but especially for 2 years, J2ME users constantly get amazed at what that thing can do. I got amazed when Youtube released a J2ME version for example and that thing could play smooth videos.

Re:Ubuntu doesn't support the Internet either

[chrispugh]

Opera on my N95.

Re:Who misses flash?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mobile Youtube works on most S40 devices.

I can easily stream it on my 6151.

Re:Surely you're joking

[eggz128]

Incidentally, I can watch the flash version on my Nokia N82 with the latest firmware.