The problem is that a handicap doesn't have to be a physical or mental disability. There are serious asymmetries of information that handicap all of us, even the smartest. To take your example, I'd say that ingredients are listed on food so that consumers have the same information as the producers. People with allergies are just a particular subset of consumers who benefit from the level information playing field.

Another example: the SEC is set up to help keep information equally spread within financial markets, and in fact its (perhaps inevitable) failure to keep up with new information asymmetries involving complex mortgage derivatives and credit default swaps contributed significantly to the recent economic collapse.

But we can disagree in each particular case about whether the government should be responsible for improving information flow, or whether consumers should carry the burden themselves. I am definitely in favor of as little regulation as possible to get the job done. I'm just saying that some information asymmetries are literally huge and there's not much consumers can be expected to do without government's help.

I carefully framed the world "disability" above to mean some disadvantage you were either born with or acquired very young, something that's fundamentally unfair or injust. You can't choose to be allergic, you can't work very hard and eventually overcome your allergies. Fate just struck you, and that's that.

I'm not sure I view 'information asymmetries' in the same light. Clearly some information (like passphrases or source code) are asymmetrical by design, and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that. I'm "disabled" in the sense that I can't read SJ's e-mail; forcing him to open his inbox would probably be "leveling the playing field" for a lot of people, but none of this is unfairness or injustice. Quite the contrary, forcing his inbox open would be an injustice. Sure, there are cases when you're investigating something else and you need to, but there's warrants and process and all that. There's a fundamental understanding that it's very very bad and only if we absolutely have to.

Similarly, meddling in the app store, private property of apple, would be an injustice. Sure, I think it needs work; what apple's doing is meanspirited. But it's their sandbox, and they need to be the ones to clean up the mess. Boycotts, nonrenewing contracts, etc., all put legitimate pressure on a company, governments work with illegitimate pressure (which can be useful if something really really bad is happening. But that isn't this situation).

First let me state that I don't think there's a role for government intervention in the case of the iPhone or iTunes right now. I am absolutely advocating for people to make a decision not to own Apple products based on the way they are treating their customers.

Now to the point. I think maybe you are misunderstanding what I mean by information asymmetry. Obviously there is a trade-off between the consumer's right to know and a company's or an individual's right to privacy. I don't think anyone would say it's ok to force SJ to open his inbox in order to have that information spread widely.

But there are times when the benefit of open information outweighs the cost imposed. And sometimes the only way to reliably eliminate information asymmetries is for the government to step in, because the free market isn't capable of self-imposed openness.

Consider cigarettes. No, I wasn't born with an inability to discover that cigarettes are highly addictive and likely cause lung cancer. I could have done a bunch of research and maybe run some experiments to determine those things. But before the landmark Surgeon General's warning in 1966 tobacco companies had pretty effectively suppressed that information. Things started to change when that warning was required on every pack of cigarettes so that every consumer was at least aware of the risks of smoking.

This is the kind of information asymmetry that the government (and you) should care about eliminating. When companies wield (political, economic, etc.) power to keep consumers in the dark. No we're not disadvantaged from birth, we're disadvantaged due to lack of resources. I think you'd be surprised how bad many aspects of our lives would be without government intervention in a lot of information asymmetry situations.

What the cigarette companies perpetrated in the 60s was fraud. This was not mere 'information asymmetry'--this was flat-out lying about what was in a product, which is its own special category of badness (to start with, it's a breach of contract, in some sense). Also, as an important (but logically irrelevant) corollary, people died.

I don't think that "information asymmetry" is ever sufficient cause for government action. And I don't think "there is a trade-off between the consumer's right to know and a company's... right to privacy". That's a weak tautology, like saying "People shouldn't have to walk through metal detectors, and should still be perfectly safe in planes." It's vague enough to be agreeable without actually having said anything.

It's easy enough to look at the Hoover Dam and say "Look at this dam! Without government intervention this dam would not exist!" The fallacy is to suggest that the choice is between the hoover dam and nothing. In fact, it's the choice between the dam and where the money would have been spent. Was the hoover dam better than whatever the market could have done with the money? I don't know, but that's an extremely difficult position to argue--you have to argue against everything.

What you're saying is, basically, the government intervened to force companies to give us information. Is that good? I'm not so sure. We started (seriously, anyway) regulating the financial markets shortly after the great depression. Then the market got too complicated for the regulators, and it crashed, so we wrote more complicated regulation. Wash, rinse, repeat. There are still as many Madoffs today as there were in the 1890s--the only operative difference is that they've been regulated into a complexity that could potentially fool even me. Meanwhile startups are too scared to IPO, which is the secret cost everybody overlooks (what we would build with the hoover dam).

By and large, you still have the same percentage of bad apples. Information has simply inflated over the years. Still the same asymmetries, just a higher floor.

And what's really perverse about the whole thing--you see huge gains in the floor during the highest asymmetries. Think about the great economic booms--railroads, industrial revolution, even recently with MS Windows and/or Office. These are periods of huge economic growth, of technology raising everyone's standards of living. And they're the periods of patents, of lawsuits, anticompetiveness, and huge economic disparities.

At the risk of committing a huge causal fallacy, I posit that asymmetry, informational or otherwise, is necessary for these gains. Or at least more necessary than most of us feel comfortable with.

The thing is your analogy doesn't hold up. Companies are required to put information like the number of calories in a product and that has nothing to do with allergies.

As for the rest of your comment I don't know. I guess we'll see. The tech community couldn't be more riled up then it is now (how many times have "I'm dropping Apple" posts made it to the front page of HN lately?). So if Apple does eventually change their policy than maybe you're right. If not I think you should reconsider your objection to limited Government intervention.

> The tech community couldn't be more riled up then it is now (how many times have "I'm dropping Apple" posts made it to the front page of HN lately?)

See, it could be much more riled up than it is. For one, developers could pull their apps from the store. That 50,000 figure Apple published ages ago could be 5,000. If Tapulous or one of the iPhone developers that Apple babies pulled their apps in protest, I guarantee it would keep Steve Jobs awake at night.

Google could stop handing macbooks to each new recruit. They could refuse to serve maptiles to future phones.

Front-page posts on HN, while I admit are more meaningful than Reddit or Digg or someplace, are chump change on the thermometer of developer outrage. All anyone's done so far about this is write passioned rants and maybe threaten to not buy any new macs personally.

Here's my problem with that.

The examples you give are never, EVER going to happen. Developers aren't going to pull their applications from the most popular computing environment just to prove a point. Nor are companies like Google going to change their whole computing environment just to prove a point. It would be corporate misconduct to flush all that money down the toilet just to prove some point to Apple that has nothing to do with your actual business.

So if we accept the actions needed for the public to make Apple change are not things that will ever happen the question is "As a society are we willing to just accept this injustice?" If your answer to that question is "Yes" that's perfectly valid. But if your answer is "No" then it requires government intervention.

Again, keep in mind, we aren't talking about forcing Apple to change their terms. Just to get them to publicly define them so developers don't waste months developing applications that may or may not be accepted.

> So if we accept the actions needed for the public to make Apple change are not things that will ever happen

But see, I don't accept that premise. For one thing, the CEO of Google just quit the Apple board, which I read as a little more than just "Too many meetings I can't take part of." For another thing, people aren't blindly loyal (except to themselves, perhaps). A mac wasn't the first computer you ever bought. An iPhone wasn't the first phone you ever made calls on. You woke up one day and decided to purchase one or both. Tomorrow you can wake up and decide to buy into another platform.

Sure, there's some friction. But that is largely for good reason. GV or no, the iPhone is better by and large than most other phones. Macs are (in some people's view, anyway) by and large better than most other computers. If they cease to become as good (or if their competitors become better), Apple will lose business. It's the same as anybody else.

> As a society are we willing to just accept this injustice?"

This is the wrong question. First of all, what's happened is not an "injustice". It might be meanspirited and in bad faith, but injustice is what happens when people are denied their rights. And "we" as "society" are not in the position to decide anything, except whether or not we want an iPhone, and whether or not we want to develop for it. Two years ago the app store didn't exist, nobody put apps on their phones. Now, everybody seems to think it's a god-given right and it has to be run a certain way. There's absolutely nothing illegal about what Apple's doing.

The government can't (and shouldn't) dictate the way it's run any more than they can dictate the plot of a Harry Potter book. Wildly popular, prosperous to many, contentious, and ultimately the product of someone's mind.

Besides, how would you do it? There's no breach of contract; developers sign a document that says that Apple can reject apps for any reason (all the rejections that I've seen actually point to a reason in the contract, which is not, technically speaking, required). The FCC's jurisdiction might extend to protecting jailbreakers, but not what software Apple allows in their own store (and certainly not to iPod Touches). I suppose Congress could increase the breathtakingly-wide interstate commerce clause, but 70% of the apps are free, which I think would give even the most expansionist observer pause. Plus you have to ponder what random nonsense would end up in the bill.

No, if there's anything to be done, Apple has to see enough pressure to change. With Google and Apple in divorce proceedings, it would be perfectly reasonable to stop serving map tiles when the contract's up. Already you see the signs: Latitude can't be a native app, GV can't be a native app, how much ad revenue does Google get from serving Youtube to phones again? That relationship's going to get sour fast.

A few things...

The CEO of Google quitting the Apple board is way different from what you describe. The actions you described would cost companies thousands if not millions of dollars and that's not going to happen.

Injustice is the denial of justice and justice is defined as "the quality of being just or fair". Denying people their rights is an injustice but only because it's unfair to do it. In the end the issue is still fairness.

Again, you use the example of dictating the plot of a Harry Potter book as why the Government shouldn't intervene. But that would be the Government telling a company HOW to run. I specifically said this isn't about that. It's about making the company define how they interact with the public. A better analogy would be the government making it illegal to put the cover of the new Harry Potter book on copies of older ones to sell copies (which in fact is illegal)

It's in Google's interest to stop dealing with Apple. They're in half the same markets. Far from costing millions of dollars, making the iPhone less attractive would be a good technical move, and positing as the open option would be a good market play.

You're confusing fairness with equality. Apple isn't being equal--it's treating some developers differently than others. But it's certainly being fair--following the terms it laid out in the SDK agreement.

This isn't about "making the company define how they interact with the public". Developers aren't the public. We're talking about publishing terms between developers and apple, and consumers only enter into the picture as an (albiet necessary) third party.