Google turns to regulators to make Apple open up iMessage | Hacker News Reader

Google turns to regulators to make Apple open up iMessage

theverge.com

39 pointssnehk51 comments

> “Through iMessage, business users are only able to send enriched messages to iOS users and must rely on traditional SMS for all the other end users,” the letter, which was sent to internal market commissioner Thierry Breton, reportedly reads. iMessage is an important gateway between businesses and their customers, and this is “without doubt justification for Apple’s designation as gatekeeper for its iMessage service,” the letter argues.

This is contorted.

Any "business user" communicating with a broad customer base is using some CRM service because they have not-Apple business customers and customer sales/service wants to reach customers "where they are" while collating conversations in one CRM.

So they use a single tool that lets them talk to many channels:

https://www.freshworks.com/live-chat-software/messaging-chan...

Apple Business Chat is there. Businesses can already talk to Apple iMessage users, along with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, SMS, etc.

From the customer side, it looks like this: https://www.apple.com/ios/business-chat/

PS. Everyone who signed that letter captures, keeps, and uses SMS chat data for advertising / marketing / commercial (money making) law enforcement access / other "legitimate" purposes.

It's not even clear what Google wants Apple to do to remedy their complaint. So you sign up for iMessage Business and you should therefore be able to send "enriched" messages to more than just iOS users. Using what?

I believe it's about integration with RCS. Now, I don't know much about rcs but presumably it's similar in features to imessage. So Google wants Apple to adopt RCS so you can send "blue" messages to others outside Apple's network.

Edit: minor punctuation.

I find it utterly perplexing how we as a society agree with a situation wherein critical communication infrastructure is allowed to be controlled by private corporations with no regulatory guidance or oversight.

It should be possible to come up with a framework based on open standards where interoperability and migration between providers is possible, while leaving some space for innovations and extensions.

So long as all traffic on the interoperable network can be caller-ID’d to the sender, that’s likely to be what we’ll get: anyone can talk on the network, and – just like iMessage today – authorities can trace, identify, and shutdown abusive senders.

Nobody is stopping you.

The comment you replied to is saying that industry + regulators together should be able to accomplish that, rather than the current state where private companies monopolize (it's a weird version of embrace, extend, extinguish) entire critical communication channels and prevent them from being more widely used.

Have you heard of email?

Email is terrible. With the amount of spam that flows through it, I have low expectations that my emails make it through spam filters, especially corporate and university ones.

So the solution is to make the other platforms open like email?

I think I can guess where this is going.

My family and I have to use WhatsApp because my parents are completely unable to send me an actual text message from their iPhone to my Android phone. I have completely unregistered my phone number from my iCloud account (which is actually only possible due to a lawsuit against Apple as you used to still have your iPhone to do this), and we've removed all traces of my contact information on their phone, but Apple is still somehow routing their text messages only to iMessage. Also, Apple seems to intentionally degrade images sent between Apple and Android phones.

Probably because you’re doing it wrong? You’re meant to “deregister” the number using the dedicated webpage, not simply unregister it / remove the number from your iCloud account.

I did deregister it via the website they were forced to put up after being sued, as I've already mentioned. I just said iCloud instead of iMessage. It should've been clear from the rest of my comment.

Maybe don't put the blame on me. It's a $1,000 phone and trillion dollar company who can't, or won't, send a text message properly. Also, I don't even use an iPhone. How is it on me that an iPhone can't send me a text message?

>Also, Apple seems to intentionally degrade images sent between Apple and Android phones.

apple probably also sends it via MMS which isn't a high quality image standard against apple/android

I think the problem with IMessage is Apple's absolute monopoly of the mobile market in the US. In europe we just use whatsapp because more than half the people we know dont have an iphone. That ain't the case in America

Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in the US mobile market.

I guess if your definition of monopoly is just "has basically all the marketshare," you're right. But there are a lot of verticals they've monopolized within the population of phone users, and it makes people feel as though they have a monopoly (and they kind of do because those users don't feel like they have a viable alternative option).

Their US market share is >50% now and most people who can afford it are using iPhone. If you have enough friends who can afford iPhones, chances are most of your friends are using iPhones. This is enough to produce a network effect that is also now a weird exclusivity effect further dividing haves and have-nots (e.g. happening in US schools between kids from different social strata).

The cheapest iPhone (SE) for sale is $429 on apple.com

Not to mention you can get slightly used iPhones that work well for potentially cheaper.

I don't think the "can afford" point is relevant anymore unless you're talking about the latest/greatest/high-end versions.

Not everyone wants an iPhone, there are lots of things you can't do on them because of apple's hyper militant approach to their app store.

Things like:

- Terminal emulators (iSH doesn't count, it's a terrible hack)

- Torrents

- File management, particularly with USB flash

- USB devices in general (drives, sensors, RTL-SDR, etc)

- And of course, sideloading

Android at least allows power users on the platform, iPhones are just devices designed to keep the dumbest possible users from inflicting self injury

> iPhones are just devices designed to keep the dumbest possible users

Why can’t you just enjoy the platform you prefer? Why insult people who prefer something else?

And, tbh, cell phones are a weird choice of thing to make part of your identity.

Precisely. It would be great if everyone had access to the same chat networks so we don't have to form cliques around what should be dumb hardware.

That's entirely unrelated to the comment I was responding to, and we already have cross-platform messaging apps today.

99.9% of people don't know or care what any of the things on your bullet list are. Nor should they, unless they have very specific needs.

You can get new android phones for $200 and that's a meaningful drop in price from $429 for many families.

Everyone else can get a used iPhone 2020 in grade-A condition for $200 which gets updates til 2026.

Is there actually a plan/assurance posted by apple anywhere, or are you just basing that on their history?

It'd be nice to know when I might need to replace the iphone I'm using as an extra phone.

Yes, almost 500 when you can get a cheap android for 150/200. Thats a big price increase.

So you're defining a monopoly as whether a company makes people feel like they're one of the cool kids?

Late reply here, but yeah! Monopoly is when you have all of something that people want and they can't get it anywhere else right? The popular social networks are monopolies even if you technically could start your own Instagram; you're just exceedingly unlikely to re-create the value you get from using the one that exists with all the users. The network is the value and it's monopolized.

iMessage is like Instagram. It's a network, and it matters. I'm speaking as someone who switched from Android to iOS recently in large part _for_ access to iMessage.

You can't build an iOS competitor and overcome the network effect of people wanting to use iMessage, even if your OS is superior in other ways. People have to choose between lesser of two evils instead of benefitting from the best-of-all-worlds. This is inherently anticompetitive -- the main reason monopolies are bad.

Market share is somewhat meaningless when you consider their market power.

WhatsApp‘s position in the European market is very bad for its own reasons too.

Absolutely. SMS are just not it, not being able to make groups etc... Good luck trying to make your granma download signal tho

I’m going to take an unpopular side here. The type of person reading these forums is not who Apple designs these products for. I try to keep my mother in mind and the I give her an iPhone “it just works and is secure” is a MAJOR consideration. There are so many other cross platform apps that people use that I don’t think that this is really something the Feds should waste their preciously under funded and understaffed man hours on, when there’s MUCH lower hanging fruit. Like soldering ram to mother boards, and DRM for screens. Google has a lousy track record with keeping projects alive and not having them be exploited for fraud and spam so until Google gets its own house in order I basically ignore the whining of ivory tower execs working from home in Mountain View. They want to get together with Meta Samsung the EFF and make something comparable or better and when and if Apple blocks that from the walled garden then that’s a different matter.

I'm not really opposed to this so long as they don't wind up regulating away (or otherwise compromising) the end-to-end encryption for iMessage.

If you care about reducing rates of teen suicide, you will not support exclusive messaging platforms like iMessage.

Apple is ok killing children because the policy underlying that outcome sells more phones. That's all there is to this story.

I get the feeling there may be more to this story.

Is this really worth fighting over? Blue bubble vs green bubble? Why is this a governance issue?

Globally, iMessage is way down the pecking order; the rest of the World uses, in order, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Snapchat. Google are bitter because it cannot get a decent service to compete despite having 70% of the global market and despite so many different attempts, which is largely down to their institutional ADHD and confused product strategy. Their claim that iMessage is a "core" service under the DMA is laughable and spiteful. If they give a crap, they ought to be going after Meta, which has by far and away the most significant part of the European messaging marketplace.

I believe Google - WhatsApp issue is coming next year thanks to the EU (https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/16deuim/europe...) [EU LInk - https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...] Will be interesting to see what happens although Apple isn't defined as a Gatekeeper in Europe yet, due to market share of iMessage however that may changed based on another investigation later in the year. I wouldn't be surprised if both of these events are relate

Google is so fucking dumb. They had the market with Hangouts. Everybody used to be on it. And they fucking burned hangouts users over and over, and now nobody uses it. They blew it, and now they should suck it up and realize they can't compete and are not going to be able to compete for years now because of how they fucked their users multiple times. Nobody is going to want to use a Google product for their messaging for a long time, until their trust is rebuilt. I guess this means their only path is for them to start suing everybody until something opens up for them. What they should do, it just give it up. This kind of shit is not good for anybody. Using the guise of openness, by saying Apple's shit is not open is hypocritical as fuck too.

How about we have a talk about Google chat. I don’t remember Google announcing it would be opened up. Or does their requirement only apply to successful services?

Yes, these EU rules only apply to services with a European user count above a certain threshold, and therefore not to unsuccessful services.

The product currently named Google Chat is Google’s replacement for Google Hangouts for the purpose of Internet-based individual and group asynchronous chat purposes, that’s (badly) attempting to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams rather than iMessage.

Google’s iMessage competitor is already open for interoperability, supporting not only SMS (like iMessage) but also the RCS standard for rich individual and group asynchronous messages, which Apple could add RCS to iMessage but doesn’t want to.

So, within the product space in which iMessage is the US market leader (and which WhatsApp leads in Europe), Google already is open and interoperable like the EU would want, but Apple isn’t. In this comment I’m not discussing motivations or making a judgment (beyond agreeing that Google Chat isn’t very successful), just describing facts.

Disclosure: I used to work for Google, but not for more than 8.5 years now, and I never worked on or set policy for any of the products I’m discussing in this comment. I’m speaking here only on my own behalf, not on Google’s, nor relying on any Google-internal information for what I’ve said above.

Is the encryption extension open? Who will manage message transport? Can they guarantee the near zero spam iMessage users currently enjoy?

To the best of my knowledge, Google has published a paper or two about their end to end encryption extension but not release source code or implementable specs or APIs.

But that is irrelevant for purposes of complying with this EU law - Google Messages can interoperate with other RCS clients without end to end encryption, which should satisfy the law.

Setting aside that extension for a moment, I do know that RCS has more sender verification / anti-fraud messages than SMS, is not inherently run or managed by Google except as one interoperable server deployment among many, is encrypted in transit even without end to end encryption, and is more widely supported than you’d think across carriers and OEMs in many countries. Apple is the biggest holdout.

iMessage is also interoperable with SMS and MMS.

Right, I mentioned that about SMS but forgot to say the same for MMS. Thanks for the clarification. iMessage does not however support RCS, which is the relevant detail here.

iMessage is the only messaging system free of spam, where sending spam gets your device banned from the network. Apple’s use of TPM attestations is mandatory to sign in, and only the gaming console networks for PlayStation/Xbox/Switch have this. It raises the cost of spamming to a hundred dollars per estimated hundred messages (actual threshold may vary), which makes it unprofitable.

This makes it highly appealing to users, and since no one else in the mobile market can secure their existing messaging network in this way, government-mandated regulation would create considerable harm to users if the flood of paid-by-spammers and data-scrapers and anticonsumer-trackers clamoring at the gates in Google’s regulatory complaint gain access.

Is the cause of openness worth that harm to users? That is ultimately for regulators to decide, and it’s a critically-important decision for everyone that makes money from messaging.

(Also, the inevitable STIR/SHAKEN requirement would likely end up requiring processor TPMs, secure attestation, and uniformly deanonymize all traffic on the ‘open’ system, accessible to ‘all’ OS boot+root images signed by corporate-registered signing certificates. I’d rather not see Google accelerate the modifiable computing apocalypse, but here we are.)

> iMessage is the only messaging system free of spam

Just so we’re clear, I receive occasional iMessage spam. I admittedly receive far more SMS spam.

Yep, device attestation doesn't prevent the "bad actors aren't detectable until they've delivered their first bad message" problem.

Not sure how you can say this with a straight face. I get spammed all the time on iMessage. Who cares if it is a blue or green bubble, it’s still spam.

Laughs in Google Voice

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