Apple keeps a very close eye on its app store, and it rejects anything “controversial” or “pornographic”. For example, it banned a cartoonist Mark Fiore’s app, and reversed that decision only after Fiore won a Pulitzer. And it recently banned a bunch of “overt sexual content” from second-tier publishers, while retaining apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated.

Here are Steve Job’s latest remarks on the controversy:

Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.

“You know, there’s a porn store for Android,” Jobs said. “You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to go there.”

I don't have a dog in this fight, not owning an iPhone, and I'm not especially vexxed one way or the other about porn on cell phones.

But I do find it odd that Steve Jobs is taking it upon himself to regulate what people do with his product.  Why not ban certain words from being texted?

It just seems to me that cell phones nowadays are essentially mini-computers, and can you imagine Dell or Hewlett-Packard making computers which restrict Internet content?

(Anyway, I'm told that you can get porn on iPhones anyway, merely because iPhones have Internet access).