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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

If I want to use FaceTime to talk to my mother, the only way I can do that is by purchasing an iPhone. What's the difference? Do I have to buy my mom a new Android phone and repurchase all her apps and digital content to exercise my Consumer Freedom?

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Your consumer freedom entitles you to a choice, not to demand companies sink money to accommodate your specific use case. Just like you can't demand for Pepsi to ship Coke product on their trucks, you can't demand Apple spend millions of dollars to port Facetime or iMessage to Android. Apple has a right to decide what sort of features and platforms they support for their apps, so if they decide to not support Android, that's just a reason for you to exercise your consumer freedom of choice and use a different product. Meanwhile, anyone else that you want to Facetime with has chosen a product (Facetime) that only allows calling other users on the same iOS software as them, and that's them exercising their consumer freedom of choice. If they want to call people that are on Android, they can choose other apps which do support calling Android phones.

But that's talking about Facetime as if it's a product. It's not - it's a feature of iOS, iPadOS and MacOS. Effectively, Facetime isn't free - it's a unlimited use service that is paid for with your initial purchase of your Mac or iOS device and includes a perpetual, transferable license.

Enacting regulation to force open access is well-trod the world over. Apple may not need to port FaceTime, but there is strong cause to demand that all social networks and communication providers either adopt open standards or open their protocols and adhere to them.

adopt open standards or open their protocols and adhere to them

I.e. no further innovation is possible?

HTML5 is a thing. Innovation of open standards occurs.

Nobody is forced to implement or adhere to HTML5.

It is completely voluntary.

Ok.

You'll find many required open standards in civic engineering and aerospace engineering, and really, any engineering where engineers carry liability. They adapt and change in response to deficiencies discovered.

You can use any number of other chat or video communications apps available on both iOS and Android to chat with your mother (I recommend Signal, but FlownScepter's list is good as well).

Your desire to specifically use FaceTime does not make it a monopoly.

My mother uses a Cryptophone[1]. The only way I can talk to her is to buy her a replacement.

What's the difference?

[1] https://www.cryptophone.de . And no, of course not.

A nonexhaustive list of FaceTime alternatives: Skype, Facebook Messenger, Discord, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, Spike, ICQ, Tox, Viber, WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, Wire.

None of those are FaceTime, which is what OP's mother uses.

That would be the meaning of "alternatives," yes.

It's not an alternative if it does not meet the necessary conditions for use.

Companies have exclusive control of their own products basically by definition. Claiming that there's some sort of monopolistic behavior inherent in a company deciding where and how you can buy their product is absolute shark-jumping.

That's a poor definition. Many companies are regulated in a manner where their services must be open to competition to access and use.

Almost no companies are regulated in this manner.

Sure they are; look outside the USA and you'll find many the world over. For instance, Canadian telecoms must provide access to their networks at minimal wholesale prices for competitors to enjoy.

The USA simply isn't a leading innovator in this regard.

Yes, the condition of being named facetime is not met. That's the point of ALTERNATIVES.

This is an incredible jump. By this logic, literally any format or given protocol can be called into question if it isn't 100% transferable between all platforms. That basically renders everything newer than line telephones, email and SMS as monopolistic.

Hell, even the different cellular carriers fail this definition because you can't use a Verizon sim card to access AT&T.

Only if the provider has reached a market position where their behaviour can adversely effect captive users.

The Verizon/AT&T comparison is interesting; because it wasn't so long ago that phones were locked to carriers.

Regulation could and should pry open the private networks of large software companies to facilitate healthy competition.

This is like complaining you can't gmail someone from your hotmail account.

If I couldn't send an email to a gmail account from a hotmail account then something is wrong.

But I literally can email somebody from email-provider a to email-provider b. But, lets be realistic, if the email would be discovered/invented today, that would not be the case ;-)

This is true; every non-ephemeral messaging system on social networks is a replacement for email. A poor replacement.

If they are a poor replacement, why does anyone use them?

A better question is why does anyone still use email if these alternatives are superior.

Enter Google AMP for Email: https://amp.dev/about/email/

You can, though. Email is interoperable, which is why you don't see a bunch of people calling for gmail to be "broken up" (though there have been complaints about the weird anticompetitive stuff they've done to try and build a moat around gmail, I haven't seen anything come out of it)

This brings up an interesting question: should companies be held accountable for the network effects generated by their products on users (not competitors)?

I’d argue not, as long as users can still achieve the same goal in a different way, and it doesn’t worsen their quality of life.

For instance, in this context, the OP’s mother can still do a phone call, or agree to use a different software - which, by the way, is probably free.

Oh come on, who hates their mother enough to make her use Webex?

/shudder

You don't know my mother. :P

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