iPhone does not provide “the whole internet” shock.

You may have woken up this morning and heard that, amongst Russia getting all ‘protective’ and the economy swandiving elegantly into the mire, that the latest iPhone has been whopped by the UK Advertising Standards Authority, because its adverts say it can access ‘the whole internet’. the ASA says it can’t and so it is fibbing.

Really? It can’t access the ‘whole internet’..?

I think, nice ASA chappies, that you might have got that wrong.

Firstly, let’s put it in context. What Apple actually mean by this (I imagine) is that, rather than dull old Mobile Internet (ahem), the iPhone opens up the world to ‘normal’ websites that do ‘normal’ things ‘normally’. AKA, the whole internet. What I believe that the ASA got it’s knickers in a twist over is that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash or Java.

Now while I think this is slack and protectivist on the part of Apple to block usage of ubiquitous technologies, it’s hardly a fair statement to say that without Flash you see a piffling little cul de sac of the information superhighway.

Most Flash sites do tend to have a low res HTML version - in fact if your site cannot be read by a blind browser, you are liable under the Disability Discrimination Law of 1995. And who in their right minds uses Java on a web page? Have you seen how IE can mangle it?

More importantly, these are proprietary technologies that are owned by companies, and so defined by commercial arrangements. Are they the definition of “the internet”?

Generally speaking I would say that it is impossible to view ‘the whole internet’ from any browser. I have chunks of ‘the internet’ on my computer that are only visible to my colleagues. Big corporations have whole internets of their own that no schmo from the outside world can access. Some big media companies have online services that cannot be seen by anything apart from Internet Explorer, when it is almost a minority browser amongst personal users.

So what is the ‘the internet’ anyway? Wikipedia (the only media resource in my mind that is as good as the BBC) defines it thus.

“By defining a simple common network system, the Internet protocol suite, the concept of the network could be separated from its physical implementation. This spread of inter-network began to form into the idea of a global inter-network that would be called ‘The Internet‘”

So it’s defined by the protocols - protocols that the iPhone can deliver. Ergo - it can be used to see the whole internet.

This is all moot really - the internet is what you want it to be. For me it is large tracts of arcane sites on classic Italian cars, news groups of design and phones, eBay’s classic car and boat parts sections, and B3ta.com on a Friday afternoon.

In some testing we did recently with kids from Hackney, one 13 year old’s eyes lit up when we asked them what their phone should be able to do.

“I want the whole internet on my phone” he said excitedly.

“So what, to you, is the whole internet?”

“MySpace, MSN, and YouTube.”

So there you go.

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Also posted on www.welovemobile.co.uk