Apple Hates Porn. But Porn Loves the iPhone.

Porn can never be washed from the Web; it can just be driven into stealth mode. And it’s no different on the mobile Web. That’s why Apple’s efforts to keep porn off the iPhone is turning into a never-ending, ever more complex campaign.

Apple (AAPL) can block as many porn-oriented apps as it wants. But the problem is that browsers are themselves apps that open a window onto the entire Web itself. Charles Rodriguez, president of iHustleApps, thought he could use a browser-based app as an end-run around Apple's porn restrictions and introduced forChan, a browser app designed for imageboards that host nasty pics.

As Krapps.com noted, Apple not only shut him down, it revoked his license to sell apps in its store and deleted the other 224 apps he sold there. That prompted a sharp and clever rebuke from Gizmodo, which argued that Apple’s logic meant it needed to ban Microsoft’s Bing app as well as its own Safari browser from the iPhone.

Would Apple delete Bing, which does what ForChan does but much easier and with much more explicit and unlimited results? My guess is that they won't, because Microsoft is Microsoft, not a no-name app developer. They should, however, just to be consistent with their stupid "no-porn" policy.

And now it looks like the new parental controls that Apple set up in the iPhone OS are still allowing children to browse soft-core images in its app store. According to Ars Technica, the controls let parents prevent children from buying the apps, but they can still view the screenshots in a lot of apps.

[E]ven though Parental Controls will limit app purchases for restricted apps, it does nothing to restrict browsing restricted apps via iTunes. Just accessing the "Lifestyle" category, for instance, will list dozens of "Amateur Swimsuit" apps, as well as "A Hidden Cam Thong." iTunes will happily display the product page and screenshots for apps such as "Movie of Sexy Japanese Girl," "Amateur Sohot Queens," or "Epic Boobs," replete with graphic text descriptions and NSFW—or school—screenshots.

Putting out these little brushfires is going to be a regular duty for Apple, or any company with a smartphone OS and an app store. In the Internet era, people will find porn if they really want it, and the porn will find them.