IP/Internet/New Media Blog

Ryan Singel of Wired’s “Epicenter” reports on a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by wired.com to the FTC.

Wired.com sought a copy of Adobe’s complaint by filing a Freedom of Information Act request in early May, which was denied in whole in a July 23 letter.(link omitted)

“We have located 189 pages of responsive records, all of which are exempt from the FOIA’s disclosure requirement,” wrote Joan A. Fina, the FTC’s assistant general counsel. “These records are exempt… because disclosure of that material could reasonably be expected to interfere with the conduct of the Commission’s law enforcement activities.”

The language all but confirms that the FTC is actively investigating Apple…

Apple has been criticized for banning Adobe Flash applications on the many Apple products such as the iPhone and iPad. Apple’s official position is that the company prefers to support open standards such as HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. However, also included in an open letter by Apple’s Steve Jobs, is this:

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

* * *

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.(emphasis added)

Singel’s Epicenter article suggests the FTC is now taking a look at Apple’s position on Flash with a possible eye to anti-trust issues.