Here at Future of the Internet, we’ve already talked a little bit about Apple’s content requirements for both the iOS and Mac App Stores in JZ’s The PC is Dead post. As JZ said,

“Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore found his iPhone app rejected because it contained “content that ridicules public figures.” Fiore was well-known enough that the rejection raised eyebrows, and Apple later reversed its decision. But the fact that apps must routinely face approval masks how extraordinary the situation is: tech companies are in the business of approving, one by one, the text, images, and sounds that we are permitted to find and experience on our most common portals to the networked world. Why would we possibly want this to be how the world of ideas works, and why would we think that merely having competing tech companies—each of which is empowered to censor—solves the problem?”

Apple’s approach is an example of a larger phenomenon. Microsoft recently released its guidelines for its new Windows 8 app store, and it looks like the company wants the same level of editorial control. From the Windows 8 Store Terms of Use:

You [the developer] may not include or submit any content that is untrue, misleading, defamatory, infringing, or harassing, that constitutes hate speech, that is or includes sexual content, that insinuates profanity, or that is otherwise objectionable.

This places Microsoft’s review team in the position of deciding what is untrue, infringing or otherwise objectionable (not to mention what “insinuates profanity” — a rather odd turn of phrase, perhaps meant to cover sanitized profanity like “sh*t”?).

There is at least one major difference between the current Microsoft store and the Apple store: Microsoft has phrased its licensing in such a way to allow free and open source software to be distributed through the store without breaking either license. In the license to customer section of its app developer agreement, Microsoft says:

Your license terms must also not conflict with the Standard Application License Terms, in any way, except if you include FOSS, your license terms may conflict with the limitations set forth in Section 3 of those Terms, but only to the extent required by the FOSS that you use. “FOSS” means any software licensed under an Open Source Initiative Approved License.

It appears that the Open Source Initiative’s licenses (which include the GPL) will then be commensurable with Microsoft’s, meaning that software developers don’t have to give up their free and open source rights (and requirements) to use the Windows 8 Store.

Like Apple’s OS X App Store, the Windows 8 store is only one method of installing applications on machines running Windows 8. Users can still download applications from the Internet or buy software elsewhere to install on their machines: “sideloading.”

Microsoft reserves the right to retroactively delete from users’ machines any apps that it no longer wants to distribute through the store. It brings to mind the 1984 Kindle incident,where Amazon removed versions of Orwell’s 1984 from purchasers’ Kindles.  ”The death of the PC” is not a claim about the withering away of the PC form-factor — but rather, the end of commonly installing software without requiring the assent of an intermediary.  Apple’s products have provided a model for this end, one now replicated in part by Microsoft.