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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writes "Apple has been running an iPhone ad saying 'all parts of the internet are on the iPhone', but it had to be withdrawn after Britain's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that it gave 'a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone' because the iPhone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?"
Knowing nothing about iPhone I have to ask, can it run a newsreader client? p2p client?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.