How Antitrust Crusaders Brought a Porn App to iPhones
A porn app called Hot Tub can now be added to iPhones in the European Union, thanks to an overzealous interpretation of antitrust law.
Hot Tub is an “aggregator that offers iOS users a way to search and play videos from a variety of adult websites, including Pornhub, Xvideos, XNXX, and XHamster,” according to TechCrunch.
Hot Tub’s journey to iPhones is a perfect story of unintended consequences. And it should serve as a warning for U.S. activists and authorities who seem to think they can both restrict access to adult content and require Apple and Google to facilitate more competition to their app stores.
How Hot Tub Made It to iPhones
For years, Apple has banned apps that carry “overtly sexual or pornographic material” from appearing in its App Store—which serves as the default marketplace for downloading apps on iPhones, similar to the Google Play store on Androids.
In recent years, some antitrust zealots have begun to denounce Apple and Google for blocking or discouraging apps—including competing app marketplaces—from being downloaded outside of their official app stores. Apple and Google said this was essential to ensuring the safety, reliability, and functionality of their products. Critics complained that they had an unfair monopoly on app distribution and sales and said this really only about making them more money.
Of course, there are ways for consumers to download apps from sources outside of official app stores, even on iPhones (which are much stricter about outside apps). And content not available through a standalone app—such as porn—could still be viewed through a browser.
But some people insist that requiring extra steps of consumers or developers amounts to unfair restraint of trade and throttling of competition. According to these folks, those convenient app stores are simply the tools of evil monopolists.
That’s how we wound up with a law like the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act, which—among other things—requires Apple to allow alternative app stores.
Last week, one of these alternative app stores started allowing iPhone users to download Hot Tub.
Right or Wrong?
Some will welcome porn apps to smartphones, and some will loathe it. To me, this is a neutral development at its core. People could already use their phones to view porn in a variety of ways, including visiting porn websites through browser apps or searching for porn on social media platforms. So it’s not as if alternative app stores are opening up phones to a heretofore unavailable type of content, although they could arguably make this content easier to access or more user-friendly to view.
To me, the interesting question and relevant moral quandary is Where is the government coercing action?
To the extent that Apple and other phone manufacturers do not want to allow porn apps and the new antitrust rules effectively require it, this is an unfair incursion on their private business decisions and free speech/association rights.
Now, one might argue that, all things being equal, executives at Apple (and other tech companies) don’t really care about preventing porn apps and the only reason they’ve imposed these rules against them is because of pressure from regulators and lawmakers. In this scenario, we’ve got competing kinds of coercion.
There’s certainly some merit to the above arguments. A lot of tech companies, including Apple and Google, seem to have gotten more restrictive about sexual content as government attention and threats around sexual content picked up.
But there are also plausible reasons that don’t have anything to
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