iPhone Web Claims Draw Governmental Rebuke in UK

Wills writes "Apple has been running an iPhone ad saying 'all parts of the internet are on the iPhone', but it had to be withdrawn after Britain's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that it gave 'a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone' because the iPhone cannot access Flash or Java – features that are essential to some websites. This raises an interesting issue of where do you draw the line between essential and non-essential features of websites. What should the web look like? Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?"

Re:Who misses flash?

[garcia]

Who misses flash?

Those of us that use sites that are built with it. While I don't need it for most mobile browsing, there are some sites where it is required. If the device can play YouTube flash videos, why can't it load the flash sites too?

I will be purchasing an iPhone shortly and know of its shortcomings but to blindly support their decision not to include something that is so very popular on the web is a bit ridiculous IMO.

False advertising

[Dancindan84]

It's probably false advertising (flash and java are part of the web and they aren't accessible from an iphone). It may or may not be the governments place to step in depending on how they deal with television regulation. Does the FCC handle false advertising at all? How is false advertising handled other than by consumer law suits?

Re:Who misses flash?

[initdeep]

that may be.

however, by stating they can access ALL of the internet, they are misleading customers.

Thus I have no problem with them being forced to pull and reword their advertisement.

it's no different than forcing companies who use speed as part of their broadband marketing to say "up to x many times faster" instead of point blank stating their maximum speed as if it were the absolute truth and everyone ALWAYS received it.

Most people won't know the difference, but if you're going to use marketing, at least use it properly.

Governement? Not so much...

[KokorHekkus]

The Advertising Standards Authority is the independent body set up by the advertising industry to police the rules laid down in the advertising codes. The strength of the self-regulatory system lies in both the independence of the ASA and the support and commitment of the advertising industry...

Source:http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/about/ [asa.org.uk]

It doesn't raise those issues

[Hektor_Troy]

This raises an interesting issue of where do you draw the line between essential and non-essential features of websites. What should the web look like? Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?

That isn't raised unless you think it's quite alright to claim that a Prius is an "all terrain vehicle" (as long as 'all terrain' doesn't include deep mud, steep unpaved hills and stuff like that).

This isn't about the government making the decision that "this or that is an essential feature of websites", it's about Manufacturer A claiming that Product B can do Feature C when obviously it cannot do Feature C but only a subset of that feature.

Lying to sell your products is not allowed in the UK. It may be in the US or elsewhere in the world, but this is about the UK. And in the UK they have this pesky law about not claiming your product can do things that it cannot do.

It's not 'governmental rebuke'

[Anonymous Coward]

The Advertising Standards Authority [asa.org.uk] is an independent advertising industry body; it is not government funded, and is not a 'government authority'.

Funny...

[iminplaya]

I didn't hear or see the word "all" the internet anywhere in the ads. "...Just the internet...on your phone". Am I seeing the same ad as all of you are?

Ubuntu doesn't advertise its Internet support

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Please point us to Ubuntu's internet advertising campaign.

You do realise what this story is about don't you?

Re:False advertising

[risinganger]

It's right there in the summary. We have the Advertising Standards Authority [asa.org.uk].

Re:Who misses flash?

[jmauro]

It does not play "flash" YouTube videos. YouTube on the iPhone is a custom client app that does not use flash at all. It won't even play all the videos YouTube has to offer only the ones that can be accessed in h264 format so the app can use the iPod video decoding software/hardware to play it with their custom interface (flash only videos will not play at all).

Re:What about NNTP? P2P?

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the subject, he's talking about something that can read NNTP, like for Usenet.

Re:Who misses flash?

[Yvan256]

Because it doesn't play YouTube flash videos. The iPhone/iPod touch accesses YouTube's videos files encoded in H.264, without a flash player wrapped around it.

Websites can (and should) detect Safari and use the HTML5 media tags to play their videos (in MPEG-4/H.264), too.

ASA is not a "government authority"

[Candid88]

"Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?""

The Advertising Standards Authority is not a government authority. It was established by the Advertising Association, a trade body representing (from the wiki) "advertisers, agencies, media and support services in the United Kingdom" The ASA's introduction on wikipedia reads:

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is the independent self-regulatory organisation (SRO) of the advertising industry in the United Kingdom. The ASA is a non-statutory organisation and so cannot interpret or enforce legislation. However, its code of advertising practice broadly reflects legislation in many instances. The ASA is not funded by the British Government, but by a levy on the advertising industry

This is how most media watchdogs in the UK are run. Important facts like this should really be checked before making very flawed summaries. For if Apple wanted, they could simply ignore the ASA's ruling. Most carriers would probably refuse to run the adverts, but it's most certainly not a "government decision".

Re:What about NNTP? P2P?

[Qwerpafw]

newsreader refers to usenet through the NNTP protocol. It has nothing to do with RSS or the New York Times.

Re:iphone sucks

[anomalous cohort]

Here is an iPhone user who hates the design [thewhole9.com]. Not the design of the phone itself but of the service plan. It turns out that the iPhone sucks if you don't live in the U.S.

Re:Confusion

[Candid88]

"That comment about whether the government should really decide is very trollish."

Not only that, but it's also completely irrelevant to the story. The Advertising Standards Authority (who deemed the advert misleading) was setup by the advertising industry's trade body and has absolutely nothing to do with the British government.

The ASA ruling is non-legally binding although all major broadcasters and publishers generally adhere to it. The appropriate governmental agencies are Ofcom (office of communication) and OFT (office of fair trading) which have the relevant legal powers. Neither of which were involved here.

Re:Is it the fault of Apple or Adobe?

[e4g4]

Really - the problem is that Adobe/Macromedia created a piece of crap in the flash client. The fact that my 2GHz C2D can have 60-70% (of one core) in use by a site with 3 or 4 flash ads on it is a testament to how grossly inefficient the software is. Putting flash (in it's desktop incarnation) on the iphone would peg it's little ARM proc and drain the battery in no time flat.

Frankly - i like the lack of flash on my iphone - it, in fact, acts as an ad-blocker of sorts.

Re:iphone sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Roaming charges in Europe are a problem in general, not just the iPhone.

Re:What about NNTP? P2P?

[risinganger]

According to the adjudication [asa.org.uk], Apple said "Which is why all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone"

Re:What about NNTP? P2P?

[mr_mischief]

From TFS:

"Apple has been running an iPhone ad saying 'all parts of the internet are on the iPhone', but it had to be withdrawn after Britain's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that it gave 'a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone' because the iPhone cannot access Flash or Java â" features that are essential to some websites. This raises an interesting issue of where do you draw the line between essential and non-essential features of websites. What should the web look like? Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?"

From TFA [asa.org.uk]:

"You never know which part of the internet you'll need. The do you need sun cream part? The what's the quickest way to the airport part? The what about an ocean view room part? Or the can you really afford this part? Which is why all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone".

Emphasis mine.

Re:Who misses flash?

[jalcide]

As others have said, those are not actually Flash encoded videos, but videos re-encoded at YouTube in an h.264 format that leverage a specialized h.264 decoder on the iPhone. But the real reason hits to the heart of Flash itself. It's still not optimized, or scalable enough for mobile (as-of-this-writing) in three key ways: General execution speed, memory footprint, and video acceleration performance. Remember, it was only version 9/AS3 that introduced a more native VM to run the compiled code, version 10 that's not even public yet that brought the first hint of hardware acceleration, and as for memory footprint, it's still a beast. Adobe created Flashlite to circumvent these issues. We're likely to see that first. Currently, Flash is still a bloated pig with legacy code and graphic routines still rooted in the late 1990's before hardware acceleration became standard, it's great for many things, but not for a mobile device, as it stands today. Even if Adobe could get it to run, it would be agonizingly slow and suck the life out of the battery for all but the simplest of sites. Adobe would need to tweak this "arm" version of the plugin to leverage the, albeit low-powered, hardware acceleration features of the iPhone. We would ultimately be compelled to make scaled-down versions of our websites just for the iPhone, if we're going to do that, it might as well be AJAX, which also runs somewhat sluggish (but runs) on the current generation iPhones. Ultimately, it gets down to power-consumption and heat dissipation. Once a new battery technology emerges, or a chip becomes even more power efficient (or both), this will all be more feasible. In the meantime, the iPhone is an amazing device for doing what it does, and with the battery life it has.

Re:parts... but not the whole internet

[TheRaven64]

If your UI was depending on mouseover, hover, or tooltips, it was broken before the iPhone. These things have never worked on any touchscreen device (certain wacom-type devices handle them by treating a very low-pressure touch as a hover, but it's still quite difficult to use). You also won't work with any browser designed for those without fine motor control (e.g. MS sufferers) which handle all interaction via a (large) keyboard and so, for a commercial site, may be in violation of your local accessibility laws.

Re:Confusion

[Tony Hoyle]

I guess if I were in the UK, I could sue.

Well you could complain to the ITC, which is what was done here. They'd then decide whether the hotels advertising was misleading and direct them to make the necessary changes.

Suing over something like that is a bit OTT.

Re:iphone sucks

[dash2]

I am pretty sure the UK government has no such right. As others have pointed out, the Advertising Standards Authority is an independent industry body, not part of the government.

Re:keyword 'all'

[Buran]

Actually, it displays it properly according to the W3C standards for HTML -- Safari even passes the Acid test.

Re:iphone sucks

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

why do supposedly intelligent fellow overhype a clumsy device?

Probably because, unlike you, they've used it.

Re:Confusion

[bigstrat2003]

And that's what they delivered.

No.

They delivered what the W3C says the Web should be coded to. They delivered email following the POP3 and IMAP standards for email.

Exactly. This is not the entire internet, nor should it be allowed to be advertised as such.

If the W3C/RFP documents that outline HTML, HTTP, HTTPS don't outline what "web and email" are, then nothing does.

Quite true. Nothing does. Like it or not, Flash and Java content is an important part of the Web, and were you to promise to deliver the whole Web (to say nothing of the internet itself, a far loftier claim!), you must deliver them. Period. If a Web site has it as content, you must be able to display it before you can say you deliver the whole Web.

I'm not saying it's unreasonable of Apple to not want to dick around with that, I'm saying they can't claim they're delivering more than they actually are.

Re:Confusion

[Sandbags]

Anything proprietary is not "The Internet" The internet is open source, defined as a small set of protocols for displaying online content. Protocols shifted over the IP network are not part of the internet. The internet is a subset of protocols, not an umbrella of all of them.

"The Internet" is accessed with a browser. "Internet Mail" is a web page that access e-mail through a browser, but is considdered diferent from e-mail, which uses IMAP, SMTP, POP, etc, and which requires other custom applications. Every e-mail server is on the net, but not all of them are on the "Internet."

Ansl, anything embeded inside of a web page is called content. Some of that content requires a 3rd party propprietary interpreter, API, or application. The Internet hands over content but displaying it or accessing it may require additional tools. These tools are not on the internet, but on your device, and hence are not part of the internet.

A file server gives me access to data files. There is no guarantee I can open the file it sends me, but I can acces sit nonetheless. HTML has built in rules for embedding 3rd party content in a site that is not capable of being displayed on the internet. If a plug-in or 3rd party external application is required, it displays such a notice. Seeing this notice (not a loading error, but an indication specifically showing the site loaded proerly, but some content will not be streamed), means the site was displayed properly, and thus, the iPhone accessed it correctly.

NO browser on the market supports Flash or JAva on its own. ALL of them require a plug in. The default configuration does NOT include flash or java for any browser. The iPhone is exactly that. It's up to the user to acquire these 3rd party plug-ins. It just happens that they are not available.

This is in complete contracts to other moble devices, which can not display the complete codeset of HTML itself, as all other browsers can, but require special "mobile" versions of websites to be created by site administrators. The ide here is that site admins need to do NOTHING extra to accomodate iPhoner users, thus we can access all of the internet the same as we do at home, provided we add support for 3rd party add-ins if site operators choose not to provide (as they used to) flash free versions of their sites (which they ALL should!!!)