Is this really worth fighting over? Blue bubble vs green bubble?
Why is this a governance issue?
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.)
Just so we’re clear, I receive occasional iMessage spam. I admittedly receive far more SMS spam.
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.
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.