Chelsea Green, the progressive press imprint, is asking whether politics are behind the fact that the iPhone app for its Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform took more than two months to get out of Apple's approval purgatory and into the iTunes Store, now that there have been reports that Apple turned down a single-payer health care app because of its politics. There aren't isolated incidents of troubles with the iTunes Store. TechCrunch has been chronicling developers' woes with getting apps rejected, getting updates rejected, and getting apps approved and then yanked. Apple has conceded that the iTunes app process has problems. But are politics at play in the Dean book case? Maybe. Maybe the Apple reviewer assigned to the Dean app is is a hardcore libertarian, personally affronted by the very idea of a government organized health care option. Or maybe the reviewer was beaten up in grade school by bullies named "Howard" and "Dean." The thing is, in some ways it really doesn't matter. The iTunes Store is Apple's world, and we just live -- increasingly -- in it.

Kyle Shank is an independent developer who worked with the WebStrong Group to build the Dean book app. I spoke with him about his experience with the approval process. Absent FCC intervention, Apple, he says, "can pretty much arbitrarily determine if you exist in the app store." The nature of the iTunes Store environment is, as Shank's troubles suggest, something that political programmers might be wise to keep in mind...

Some big big news from the world of Internet governance. The context is that while we tend to talk about the Internet as if its some sort of organic wonder, the truth is that there is a Dr. Frankenstein in the mix. (Is that a bad reference? I never read the book. Onward.) A group with the underwhelming name of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as ICANN, has fairly quietly guided the Internet's development. But what's more is that, despite our declarations of independence and thoughts of a supra-national global network, ICANN has, for its 11 years of existence, been tied to the United States government.

The big news? Yesterday, the "joint project agreement" that formalized that relationship between ICANN and the Department of Commerce was intentionally allowed to lapse, and a new agreement spells out a far more open relationship -- meaning there's suddenly a bit more space between offline governments and web governance. PC World has the story.