Australia Considering iPhone App Censorship

srjh writes "Having raised concerns about 'the classification of games playable on mobile telephones,' the Australian government has now 'put the wheels in motion to address this.' Under current Australian legislation, video games sold in the country must pay between $470 and $2040 to have the game classified, and due to the lack of an 18+ rating in Australia, if it is not found to be suitable for a 15-year-old, it is banned outright. This is the fate met by several recent titles, such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Fallout 3. Over 200,000 applications are available for the iPhone, many of them games, and developers have raised concerns about the prohibitive costs involved, with many announcing an intention to drop the Australian market altogether if the plan proceeds."

Comments

Re:Good grief!

[thegarbz]

And fuck Australia in every other way. Ruin all international ties in the favour of saving a few whales etc.

The greens are a great balance to have sitting there in the useless thing we call parliament, but you do NOT want them actually running the country.

Re:This comment not safe for 15-year-old

[WinstonWolfIT]

Fuck you too buddy. We have two of the top 10 liveable cities in the world. The US of Nothing has Zero. Get your shit together and then take us on for how we run things.

Re:Yet another reason not to get an IPhone

[Animaether]

I'm not entirely sure how this has -nothing- to do with Apple. Yes, the ruling would apply to any app store and all that.

But for my Windows Mobile phone.. it doesn't care where I browse to (purchase and) download an app. It could be one of the many dedicated stores or it could be XDA-Dev or it could be some lone developer's app stuck in an archive.org copy off of an old geocities page.

For my Android phone.. it also doesn't care which store I visit or whether I visit a store at all, I can install the apps manually if needed.

An iPhone, however... if you bought the thing in Australia, odds are its original locale is Australia and you're only supposed to access the Aussie app store. You can change the locale, then visit e.g. the U.S. app store, and create a new account (with valid, although obviously not your own, address data), then work with that. Of course, some apps you already have might then refuse to work.
The only proper work-around seems to be in jailbreaking the thing, with all its consequences.

Simply by being the -only- store that can normally be accessed -and- having locale-specific offerings, Apple actually plays a major role in how this ruling would apply to the iPhone.

My information on this is a few months old, though, so if the buy-from-other-app-store situation has changed for the iPhone, I'll gladly stand corrected.

Re:Good grief!

[BitZtream]

I'm American.

We elect our politicians.

We are most certainly fucking stupid if you base your judgement on our politicians.

Please don't assume the people in a country are as stupid as those in power.

I'll make plenty of stupid convict jokes about Austrailians just case it seems to annoy them so much, but I don't for an instant hold what their government does on this level against them. Its a little different if they allow their government to invade a country for oi .... oh fuck it, nevermind.