Screening out pornography

WASHINGTON -- Late on a Friday night in May, when the small children of first-generation iPad users were fast asleep after bedtime stories on its fascinating new digital display, a tech blogger launched this e-mail fireball at Apple CEO Steve Jobs:

"If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with 'revolution?' Revolutions are about freedom."

So began an e-debate between the blogger and the CEO.

"Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data," Jobs wrote back. "Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a-changin'"

Seems what set the blogger off was Apple's new iPad commercial. The ad touts "revolution" with images of an iPad owner on a scooter, a parent and child reading Winnie-the-Pooh, and examples of 200,000 applications, aka "apps."

Among these apps you can find almost anything from The Wall Street Journal to Weber grill recipes to air hockey. But you won't find porn.

That bothers the tech blogger. So do other standards Apple set for developers who want to use its platform to reach consumers. The blogger "worries about Apple's growing power to limit self-expression."

So he shot back: "I don't want 'freedom from porn.' Porn is just fine!"

Jobs suggested the blogger might grow concerned about porn when he has children.

He's right. Parents have good reason to care about pornography. Production and consumption of porn are rampant, and children are particularly vulnerable.

About 116,000 online searches for child pornography happen daily, according to "The Social Costs of Pornography," a recent report from the Witherspoon Institute. Every second, more than 28,000 Internet users are viewing porn. That includes young people who trip on it accidentally.

Production of porn is massive and growing - in quantity and edginess. Time magazine reporter Pamela Paul, author of the book "Pornified," notes that the porn industry makes 11,000 films a year compared with 400 from Hollywood. And pornography exploits all our postmodern world's multimedia possibilities, including music videos, video games, "sexting" via cell phone ... and would-be iPad apps.

It's encouraging to see corporate leaders exercising moral intuition about the cultural space they're creating in a product such as the iPad. Since one of the iPad's signature features, Safari, provides access to the Web, the vast content includes porn sites and still presents challenges for parents.

It's a different story when it comes to Apple's app domain, though.

As Jobs explained in his e-mail exchange: "(W)e're just doing what we can to try and make (and preserve) the user experience we envision. You can disagree with us, but our motives are pure."

According to his blogging critic, that's Jobs imposing his morality on the rest of the world.

But, as the Apple CEO correctly points out, there's a difference between censorship and corporate stewardship: "Users, developers and publishers can do whatever they like - they don't have to buy or develop or publish on iPads if they don't want to."

The reality is that communication of any sort gives all of us an opportunity to express our morality. Technological advances exponentially expand our freedom to impress that morality on the world around us.

With that freedom comes responsibility.

And by putting boundaries on what providers can offer on its app platform, Apple does a service to parents still struggling to keep up with today's innovations, get ready for tomorrow's and shape their children's moral intuition for a lifetime.