Devil’s advocate here, but I think geolocation is more important than SIM card or place of purchase.

China doesn’t want certain information within its borders. If you could “smuggle” it via outside phone + outside SIM, it makes all protections worthless.

Same with Netflix: even though I pay with credit card from Europe, when physically (IP-wise) in US I can see the US catalog.

Except that's not how it works in reality (and the article covers this): if I go to China with my T-Mobile US SIM card in my phone, and connect to a Chinese telecom network, I will still be able to access Facebook, Google, and any news site, regardless of whether or not the Great Firewall would usually block it for Chinese citizens with Chinese SIM cards.

But Apple is censoring content on US phones with US SIM cards while they're physically located inside China, which is a huge departure from established practice, and isn't actually useful since the same non-Chinese phone can access all the same news sites via Safari.

Just to note, the uneven implementation and enforcement of their censorship laws is still a China problem, not an Apple problem.

The idea that Apple is controlling things here does not make sense. Obviously, if Apple had the choice they wouldn't censor Apple News at all.

Just like they don’t voluntarily censor the App Store in the US?

That's an issue, but it's a separate issue.

We know Apple isn't blocking Apple news voluntarily in China because if they were, they would choose to block it other places too. In fact, blocking it everywhere would be trivially easy and very cheap: they would simply not have a News app at all.

If you don't like Apple's publishing standards, then by all means object as vociferously as you see fit. Just don't get that confused with the Chinese government's control of information.

My issue isn’t with any single particular instance of censorship, but with Apple’s willingness to censor, regardless of market or local regulations.

This is exemplified by this above-and-beyond blocking, as well as their censorship of entirely legal content (e.g. nudity) in the US app store.

I would have much less issue with them if there were a setting to install an alternative app store on the iPhone; then it would simply be editorializing. As it stands there is no way for me to persist e.g. a gay porn app on my iPhone, and that crosses the line into voluntary censorship of legal content by Apple.

I don't think you know what China's legal requirements in censorship are. I think you're trying to infer what they are from the fact that the censorship of other content sources works somewhat differently. But these look like differences in implementation details.

> ...censoring news voluntarily...

That just doesn't make sense. If Apple wanted to censor their News app, there's no reason they would restrict themselves to China. They could "block" it everywhere, if that's what they wanted to do -- by simply not having a News app at all.