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...

As writer Steven Johnson noted in a tweet, what's striking
about this Google Voice/iTunes situation is the alacrity with which the FCC jumped into the mix. What's also notable: in doing it, they're coming to the defense of the 'net-based content creator, rather than big telecom. The commission, reported the Washington Post, shot off letters to Apple and AT&T on Friday asking the companies to explain their alleged decision to keep the Google Voice iPhone app out of the iTunes store. "Recent news reports raise questions about practices in the mobile marketplace," said FCC chair Julius Genachowski. The letter asked if AT&T and Apple worked together to come to the decision to ban the app, and if so, to "please describe the communications between Apple and AT&T in connection with the decision to reject Google Voice."

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has resigned from the Apple board over the fracas. (Photo credit: World Economic Forum)