Stop us if you have heard this one before: Apple is placing profits before human decency, compassion, and well-being.
A combined report published earlier this week by digital-rights teams Fights the Future and GreatFire details the Large Tech behemoth’s monopolistic approaches are allowing many nations’ censorship of all LGBTQ+ communities through the elimination or banning of different queer and queer-adjacent programs. “Many of those App Stores in which the largest apps are obstructed, match with nations currently low on the record for individual rights to its queer community,” reads the classes’ official announcement on the accounts.
But, the amount of eliminated LGBTQ+ programs often varies by state, irrespective of the country’s degrees of births involving queer inhabitants, which the bands stated highlight “Apple’s role in allowing this censorship.” Fight the Future and GreatFire mention Malaysia as a prime case: Even though homosexuality remains illegal in the nation, just seven LGBTQ+ programs are eliminated by the App Store. Meanwhile, states like Niger and South Korea are the top 10 worst criminals, even though legalizing homosexuality.
“Apple can assert that blocking programs in which LGBTQ+ people can find community and security is merely the price of doing business’ in underdeveloped nations, but the truth is that Apple’s draconian App Store Values — notably its choice to stop users from installing programs from your open internet to keep control and gains — leaves such discrimination and censorship potential,” clarified Fight for the Future’s manager, Evan Greer.
It increasingly resembles the App Store’s stranglehold online consumer access is not tenable in the long term… a potential Apple has reportedly known for quite a while now, making this somehow worse.
The worst offenders: It is unsurprising which countries become very restrictive. According to the report, Saudi Arabia has been rated as the worst culprit, using 28 reported LGBTQ+ programs inaccessible within the nation, followed closely by China, eliminating 27 programs. The cheapest program globally is we belong, also a social network for many individuals, that is nowhere available in 144 App Stores.
A RELATIVELY SIMPLE SOLUTION — Obviously, there is a fairly simple method to cut down countries’ crackdowns on queer individuals’ access to those users as well as life-threatening programs: enables international customers to access third party program downloads. “If Apple, such as Google’s Android, let installations in the open internet, there wouldn’t be any conflict with local authorities. However, Apple is not doing so to safeguard its monopoly as well as the flow of free cash it extorts from program developers,” the bands’ press release reads.
“That is an issue of life and death to all queer and trans individuals all over the planet, who frequently seek community and security using these programs,” said Fight for the upcoming campaigner and researcher Utsav Gandhi. “It is unsuitable for Apple to keep this company clinic, which is incompatible with fundamental human rights and security for LGBTQ+ individuals.”
