Vint Cerf, “godfather of the internet,” once said: “pornographers are almost always the first ones to adopt new technology.” Looks like he was right.
Walter Isaacson’s new biography “Steve Jobs” paints a portrait of the former Apple leader as a painfully exacting, perfectionist visionary who oversaw the tiniest details of his products and their offerings. Everything about Apple products were designed to be “insanely great,” with no compromises and no exceptions. For Steve Jobs, porn never fit that description.
The Apple App Store is a famously controlling environment where each app has to be submitted, tested by Apple’s engineers for bugs and subject to Apple’s approval for acceptable content. Apple has denied all kinds of material deemed offensive, and has always categorically forbidden “adult material” from the App Store.
Google’s Android Market, however, is more like the wild west. While not all apps are promoted equally, developers can submit apps to the market and make them available for download without being subjected to Google’s approval as “suitable content.” This is consistent with Google’s web search engine, who famously refuses to edit the results of what’s accessible through its search results, as long as it doesn’t make them an accomplice to crime. This of course leads to a somewhat different user experience. It’s also probably part of what led Jobs to declare shortly before he died that he was ready to go to “thermonuclear war” with Google and spend every last penny of Apple’s money suing Android and the Android Market out of existence. Jobs knew what he had created and envisioned—and the Android market wasn’t it.
As if proving the point, just a week after Google’s new Google TV rolled out, TechCrunch reports Vivid Entertainment has introduced the first pornography experience into the Google TV ecosystem. From TechCrunch: “According to Vivid, it will be the first app ‘designed to make sexually explicit content available through the new Google TV set top device.’ In high-definition, no less.”
Three years ago Vint Cerf, one of the earliest pioneers of creating the Internet, told Esquire: “I was disappointed that pornography got to the Net. But I’ve come to learn that pornographers are almost always the first ones to adopt new technology. If there is a new way of distributing their product, they’ll find it.”
Jobs wasn’t the only one who wanted to keep porn out of web experiences. However Cerf now works for Google as Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, where he’s been since 2006. Some things you can’t fight. As an official internet “evangelist,” he seems to know what he’s talking abut—Vivid proved him absolutely right as their app is a pioneer in the Google TV space. Vivid cheif Steven Hirsch said its Google TV component was a year in the making, designed to be a “robust, standalone Internet-TV channel with a friendly interface for the consumer that can be used with the current Google TV technology and other Internet protocol presentation methods now in development.”
Let this be a lesson: the pornographers will always find a way to prevail.
November 08, 2011 at 10:24 am, DJSC said:
Hey, FYI what made Jobs want to declare “thermonuclear war” had nothing to do with google’s “open” philosophy of design. It had to do with google baldly stealing the underlying IP that went (and goes) into the iPhone. There are plenty of other companies — very successful companies — that Jobs had competed with which he didn’t decare he was “going to war” against. This isn’t about competition. It’s about stealing someone’s patented ideas. Why should google get a pass for that?