The BBC’s having to apologise to Mexico (BBC News) after Top Gear did an episode in a very Top Gear manner, taking the piss out of Mexicans in a low-brow, vaguely xenophobic way. This, apparently, has caused “outrage”, for some reason, because, clearly, Top Gear is a serious news programme and not just three blokes arsing about and wanking over car porn.

One of the few sane voices on the spat, Robert Llewellyn, says:

One of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met was a Mexican architect. He wasn’t lazy, he didn’t wear a poncho, he cooked some of the best food I’ve ever eaten and he was a gentle, non judgmental kind man. I also know if he’d watched Top Gear the other night he would have laughed because he wouldn’t be threatened by such inanity. He would have known that the three middle aged men in jeans had not a clue about Mexican history and culture, he would know what they were really doing was revealing their own ignorance and frail self worth.

Llewellyn’s post seems to swerve between whether Top Gear was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but ultimately comes to the conclusion that the episode was merely embarrassing. The bigger argument, though, is should the BBC be self-censoring? It’s one thing for the news to carry on in this manner (almost unheard of in the UK, although some US channels, like Fox News, do this kind of thing all the time), but should television be sanitising an entertainment show? And if so, what about comedies?

Last year, Stephen Fry said there was such a culture of fear at the BBC that it was shying away from taking creative risks. And, indeed, even the man himself has been hit, with the Japanese embassy complaining over a section of a recent QI that featured a discussion on the nuclear bombings of 1945. While some of the comments were undoubtedly in poor taste (such as Davis quipping that bombs had bounced off survivor of both blasts, Mr Yamaguchi), it’s insane to think this sparked a minor international incident. Even more crazy is the tone of the BBC’s own report, which adds:

And Stephen Fry expressed amazement that the Japanese trains were still running after the blast.

Indeed he did express amazement, but that wasn’t him being derogatory—he was amazed at how the country managed to deal so well with being bombed twice by brand new, deadly weaponry. That’s not something to be apologetic about in the slightest.

Still, lucky no other countries ever portray the British in a stereotypical fashion or make jokes at our expense, eh? Man up, BBC. The Top Gear thing wasn’t anything to be proud of, but it wasn’t, in the context of the show, anything to apologise over; and that QI—the best-mannered, most intelligent, most interesting panel show around—also finds itself in a similar situation is nothing short of maddening. Sometimes it’s like the BBC wants to find itself being the British PBS in a decade’s time.

Absolutely fucking nothing.

And any publication that says anything different is lying out of its arse.

Google’s bitching that Microsoft Bing’s ripping off its search results.

Google:

At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.

Perhaps Google should look at its own actions before criticising others. Android is one of Google’s most important products now, but it’s interesting to note how rapidly it went from being something akin to a BlackBerry to a knock-off iPhone once Apple’s device appeared. (And while Larry Page claims Google was working on Android before the iPhone arrived, Apple was working on iOS for years before, as part of the SafariPad skunk works project. Plus BlackBerry-like Android devices were what Google showed off after the iPhone was in the wild.)

Maybe Apple should say:

At Apple we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our iOS devices’ quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our iOS devices and iOS itself because we want our users to get the best experience every time they use them, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new companies in this space that are out there—with products built on core innovation, and not on recycled ideas and concepts from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant smartphone and touchscreen devices, we encourage you to come directly to Apple. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.

Or maybe Google should just stop whining about others ripping it off when it does precisely the same thing itself.

The New York Post quotes analyst Ezra Gottheil:

If you want to get a device out—if you’re [a manufacturer]—do you have to go with what’s available right now or do you wait for the next generation to come out?

If you’re Apple and what’s available’s not good enough, you wait. If you’re pretty much everyone else, you don’t, and you risk releasing sub-optimal hardware, like the Galaxy Tab. Oddly, most of the market still doesn’t get this.

I wrote earlier today about an Apple/Sony spat regarding iOS app purchases. Sony’s reader app was rejected, and the internet exploded with speculation regarding what this meant. According to All Things Digital, Apple has in fact lost it. Apple spokesperson Trudy Miller says:

We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.

This suggests Kindle and similar apps must now at least offer the option of in-app purchase (which means Apple would get a 30 per cent cut). I can’t see that being tempting to Amazon—instead, I imagine Amazon will pull its app.

Me, earlier:

[This] would hand millions of potential iOS users a damn good reason to seriously consider competing platforms.

However, I would hope that Apple isn’t going down that particular road, because making an enemy of Amazon (now the owner of Lovefilm, Apple’s biggest competition in digital music, and soon to open its own Android store) would be a bad move, and if Apple attempts to enforce its own systems and effectively ban the competition, it’s going to (rightly) get smacked hard by multiple anti-competition commissions and have the kind of PR fallout even Cupertino can’t dance around.

I’ll bet they’re laughing their arses off over at Android HQ, because Apple just handed its competition a massive PR win and the tools for everyone to screech ‘open’ at the top of their voices, forever.