If I acquire an iPhone second hand, I’ve potentially never given Apple a dime and I’m allowed to use iMessage for free with no ads as much as I want.
Just a thought exercise.
Apple has a business chat function in iMessage where you can chat with customer service at various companies via iMessage.
Presumably the businesses pay for this functionality? If so, someone using Beeper mini to contact a company is making Apple money.
No one in this thread so far as adequately demonstrated why Apple should be forced to provide a free service — at their own expense — to non-customers. Has any company ever been forced to do that?
For me, the answer is clearly no; there are plenty of communication platforms that can be used freely with interoperability (e.g. email). And, as you note, there are lots of interoperable options.
Since when is any utility service free? Electricity, water, phone service. All of these require payment for service. For electricity you have to pay for both generation (from your chosen generator) and for transmission on the wires to your house. For water you have to pay for all water and sewage service to your house. For phone service you have to pay your provider. If you roam outside of their network they have to pay the other network to carry your traffic (and then it’s up to your provider to decide how to charge you for roaming).
Edit: I should add that email is an example of a service which is not a utility. Why? Email providers are free to block any message they like, preventing delivery in either direction. They typically use this discretion to filter spam but they're under no obligation to deliver. Anyone who has set up their own email server will know what I'm talking about: you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get your emails delivered to Gmail users!
Where do you live?
Essential services or utilities are NOT free in United States. Everyone has to pay for water, heat, gas, etc. There's no free access to it.
The clear reason why they are bundling this service with their existing products at a loss is to expand their market share at the expense of interoperability.
This bundling is clearly an antitrust issue, I have a hard time believing all these arguments defending the wealthiest corporation on Earth aren’t being deliberately obtuse.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/us-smartphone-...
That market share is certainly enough to warrant FTC regulation. The FTC investigates anticompetitive activity even when the perpetrator is not a monopoly.
While Microsoft had a higher market share, Windows never prevented users from installing a third-party web browser. On the other hand, Apple is actively blocking third-party SMS/MMS clients from iOS via its App Store restrictions. This factor makes it more likely that Apple will be regulated despite iOS currently having a lower market share than Windows during Microsoft's antitrust trial.
The issue here is the iMessage service. Throughout this thread, I have not seen anyone give a single example from US history (monopoly or otherwise) where a company has been forced to provide free access to a service -- at their own expense -- to the customers of their competitors. It's unprecedented!
It's just like airport VIP lounges. Should an airline that offers free VIP lounge access for their business and first class ticket-holders be forced to allow customers of competitor airlines to use their VIP lounge for free? After all, you can meet people in a VIP lounge so there are networking effects. Yet it really doesn't seem right that an airline who built and maintains a VIP lounge at their own expense (rental space in an airport is NOT CHEAP) should be forced to give away access to that space for free to competitors' customers.
How is the iMessage case any different?
Edit: I should also add that I bet Apple can produce a TON of data from usage patterns to show that iMessage in no way harms competitive messaging products on iPhones. Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Snapchat, and countless other messaging products are doing just fine on the iPhone, so I doubt the "bundling" argument holds any water. As for how iMessage affects the Android market? Since when is it against the law to add free features/services to your products in order to distinguish them from your competitors' offerings?
Microsoft lost their antitrust case over IE because they harmed Netscape's browser business on Windows. Bundling IE with Windows had no affect on the Mac/Linux/Unix business and the case was never about that.
Apple's anticompetitive conduct is that it bans third-party SMS/MMS clients as a way to boost usage of its iMessage protocol and disadvantage competing cross-platform messenger services. Microsoft never banned competing web browsers from accessing any protocol (e.g. HTTP or FTP) on Windows, so Apple's conduct in the messaging space is more egregious than Microsoft's previous conduct in the browser space.
As a user I don’t want these other apps getting access to my incoming SMS messages. I’m fine with one app getting all the messages. It really doesn’t make any difference whether my messages have green or blue bubbles (and people complaining about that are really stretching).
As for the argument that 3rd parties should be allowed access to the iMessage network. When are all those other apps coming aboard that plan? When can I write my own app for Messenger instead using Meta’s?
It's common sense that when Apple forbids competitors from implementing a feature that they use for their own product, competitors are harmed. Apple previously made Apple Mail the default email client on iOS with no option to change it. After Apple removed this anticompetitive restriction in iOS 14, competing apps such as Proton Mail and Tuta (which used their own protocols instead of the default IMAP/SMTP protocol to support end-to-end encryption) immediately became more convenient to use on iOS.
The issue with Apple's SMS/MMS client restriction is more severe. Not only am I not able to designate a different messenger as the default SMS/MMS app on iOS, I cannot install one in the first place because Apple has banned them altogether.
Am I the only one who remembers 2006-era Google Talk with federated XMPP? As a user, it was amazing, and I want that level of interoperability back across the board.
Because you bought a product that doesn't allow that. In fact, goes out of its way to prohibit it.
Messages is not an open platform, one of its features is the use of open standard SMS for fallback to chat with your friends on any platforms but SMS itself never had any support for encryption.
Hopefully, next year, Apple will switch to RCS and the RCS industry will adopt encryption between all clients and platforms.
If you want to talk to your friends on an open chat platform that is open to any platform and any client, you can with services like Signal.
You can't get that with iMessage because that is not the service that Apple is offering. If the service does not meet your needs, use another one.
Why should Apple be forced to be all things to all people? If Netflix doesn't want to offer an Ubuntu client, why should they be forced to just because you paid for it? That's not part of the service offering.
Feel free to agitate for it, but shouldn't Netflix (or whomever) get to run their business their way?