EU Joins FTC in Probing Apple's Ban on Flash

Apple's move to exclude Flash as a supported standard on its iOS devices is being investigated by  European regulators who've now teamed with the Federal Trade Commission to probe the company's policies and determine whether the Cupertino-based giant is harming competition.

The New York Post is reporting that the FTC commenced its investigation on Apple's policies for mobile software developers back in June, two months after the Mac maker issued an official statement justifying its decision to shut out Adobe's Flash from its iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

In April, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs posted an open letter entitled “Thoughts on Flash,” outlining that “...Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices.”

The CEO added that Apple had “discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.”

The letter continued with Jobs saying “We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform."

In case Apple allowed Flash developers to write code for iOS, Apple's chief executive said they could only take advantage of platform enhancements “if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features,” as they (the developers) would “grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools.”

The CEO concluded by saying “We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.”

The European Union is known to have recently adopted a new Digital Agenda with the focus of encouraging the interoperability of technology.