Lines Around the Globe at Apple Stores on iPhone 5’s First Day

In London, some shoppers had camped out for a week in a line that snaked around the block. In Hong Kong, the first customers were greeted by staff members cheering, clapping, chanting "iPhone 5! iPhone 5!" and high-fiving them as they were escorted one by one through the front door.

The smartphone was on sale in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Britain, France and Germany, as well as the United States and Canada, and was to be introduced in 22 more countries in a week. The iPhone 5 is thinner, lighter, has a taller screen, faster processor, updated software and can work on faster “fourth generation” mobile networks.

The handset has become a hot seller despite initial lukewarm reviews and new map software that is error-prone. Apple received two million orders in the first 24 hours of announcing its release date, more than twice the number for the iPhone 4S in the same period when that phone was introduced a year ago.

In a sign of the intense demand, police in Osaka, Japan, were investigating the theft of nearly 200 iPhones 5s, including 116 from one shop alone, Kyodo News reported. In London, police sought help finding a man wanted in connection with the theft of 252 iPhone 5s from a shop in Wimbledon early Friday.

Analysts have estimated Apple will ship as many as 10 million of the new iPhones by the end of September. Its stock rose in morning trading in New York to a new intraday high.

In Paris, the phone unveiling was accompanied by a workers’ protest — a couple of dozen former and current Apple employees demonstrated peacefully to demand better work benefits. Some decried what they called Apple’s transformation from an offbeat company into a multinational powerhouse.

But the protesters were far outnumbered by lines of hopeful buyers on the sidewalk outside the store near the city’s gilded opera house.

Not everyone lining up at the various Apple stores was an enthusiast, though. In Hong Kong, a university student, Kevin Wong, waiting to buy a black 16-gigabyte model for 5,588 Hong Kong dollars ($720), said he was getting one "for the cash." He planned to immediately resell it to one of the numerous gray market retailers catering to mainland Chinese buyers. China is one of Apple’s fastest-growing markets but a release date for the iPhone 5 there has not yet been set.

Mr. Wong was required to give his local identity card number when he signed up for his iPhone on Apple’s Web site. The requirement prevents purchases by tourists including mainland Chinese, who have a reputation for scooping up high-end goods on trips to Hong Kong because there is no sales tax and because of the strength of China’s currency. Even so, the mainlanders will probably buy it from the resellers “at a higher price — a way higher price,” said Mr. Wong, who hoped to make a profit of 1,000 Hong Kong dollars ($129).

On Web, a Fine Line on Free Speech Across the Globe

The White House was not so sure, and it asked Google to reconsider the determination, a request the company rebuffed.

Although the administration’s request was unusual, for Google, it represented the kind of delicate balancing act that Internet companies confront every day.

These companies, which include communications media like Facebook and Twitter, write their own edicts about what kind of expression is allowed, things as diverse as pointed political criticism, nudity and notions as murky as hate speech. And their employees work around the clock to check when users run afoul of their rules.

Google is not the only Internet company to grapple in recent days with questions involving the anti-Islamic video, which appeared on YouTube, which Google owns. Facebook on Friday confirmed that it had blocked links to the video in Pakistan, where it violates the country’s blasphemy law. A spokeswoman said Facebook had also removed a post that contained a threat to a United States ambassador, after receiving a report from the State Department; Facebook has declined to say in which country the ambassador worked.

“Because these speech platforms are so important, the decisions they take become jurisprudence,” said Andrew McLaughlin, who has worked for both Google and the White House. Most vexing among those decisions are ones that involve whether a form of expression is hate speech. Hate speech has no universally accepted definition, legal experts say. And countries, including democratic ones, have widely divergent legal approaches to regulating speech they consider to be offensive or inflammatory.

Europe bans neo-Nazi speech, for instance, but courts there have also banned material that offends the religious sensibilities of one group or another. Indian law frowns on speech that could threaten public order. Turkey can shut down a Web site that insults its founding president, Kemal Ataturk. Like the countries, the Internet companies have their own positions, which give them wide latitude on how to interpret expression in different countries.

Although Google says the anti-Islamic video, “Innocence of Muslims,” was not hate speech, it restricted access to the video in Libya and Egypt because of the extraordinarily delicate situation on the ground and out of respect for cultural norms.

Google has not yet explained why its cultural norms edict applied to only two countries and not others, where Muslim sensitivities have been demonstrably offended.

Free speech absolutists say all expression, no matter how despicable, should be allowed online. Others say Internet companies, like governments, should be flexible enough to exercise restraint under exceptional circumstances, especially when lives are at stake.

At any rate, as Mark L. Movsesian, a law professor at St. John’s University, pointed out, any effort to ban hateful or offensive speech worldwide would be virtually impossible, if not counterproductive.

“The regimes are so different, it’s very, very difficult to come up with one answer — unless you ban everything,” he said.

Google’s fine parsing led to a debate in the blogosphere about whether the video constituted hateful or offensive speech.

Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University, said Google was justified in restricting access to the video in certain places, if for no other reason than to stanch the violence.

“Maybe the hate speech/offensive speech distinction can be elided by the smart folks in Google’s foreign ministry,” Mr. Spiro wrote on the blog Opinio Juris. “If material is literally setting off global firestorms through its dissemination online, Google will strategically pull the plug.”

Every company, in order to do business globally, makes a point of obeying the laws of every country in which it operates. Google has already said that it took down links to the incendiary video in India and Indonesia, because it violates local statutes.

But even as a company sets its own rules, capriciously sometimes and without the due process that binds most countries, legal experts say they must be flexible to strike the right balance between democratic values and law.

“Companies are benevolent rulers trying to approximate the kinds of decisions they think would be respectful of free speech as a value and also human safety,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard.

Unlike Google, Twitter does not explicitly address hate speech, but it says in its rule book that “users are allowed to post content, including potentially inflammatory content, provided they do not violate the Twitter Terms of Service and Rules.” Those include a prohibition against “direct, specific threats of violence against others.”

That wide margin for speech sometimes lands Twitter in feuds with governments and lobbyists. Twitter was pressed this summer to take down several accounts the Indian government considered offensive. Company officials agreed to remove only those that blatantly impersonated others; impersonation violates company rules, unless the user makes it clear that it is satirical.

Facebook has some of the industry’s strictest rules. Terrorist organizations are not permitted on the social network, according to the company’s terms of service. In recent years, the company has repeatedly shut down fan pages set up by Hezbollah.

In a statement after the killings of United States Embassy employees in Libya, the company said, “Facebook’s policy prohibits content that threatens or organizes violence, or praises violent organizations.”

Facebook also explicitly prohibits what it calls “hate speech,” which it defines as attacking a person. In addition, it allows users to report content they find objectionable, which Facebook employees then vet. Facebook’s algorithms also pick up certain words that are then sent to human inspectors to review; the company declined to provide details on what kinds of words set off that kind of review.

Nudity is forbidden on Facebook, too. This year, that policy enmeshed the social network in a controversy over photographs of breast-feeding women. Facebook pages were set up by groups that objected to the company’s ban on pictures of exposed breasts, and “nurse-ins” were organized, calling on women to breast-feed outside Facebook offices worldwide.

The company said sharing breast-feeding photos was fine, but “photos that show a fully exposed breast where the child is not actively engaged in nursing do violate Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”

Just this month, a New Yorker cartoon tripped over Facebook’s rules on exposed breasts. On its Facebook page, the magazine displayed a cartoon that contained the topless figures of a man and women. The illustration was removed for violating Facebook’s naked breast decree.

Facebook soon corrected itself. With “hundreds of thousands” of reported complaints each week, the company said, sometimes it makes a mistake.