> The company has previously said that its practices do not violate antitrust law. In defending its business practices against critics in the past, Apple said that its “approach has always been to grow the pie” and “create more opportunities not just for our business, but for artists, creators, entrepreneurs and every ‘crazy one’ with a big idea.”

Tell that to Beeper Mini who had the crazy idea of growing the pie of iMessage users, following the original protocol seamlessly through adversarial interoperability.

It is quite debatable over whether Apple should be forced to allow another company to make money using adverse interoperability and server runtime costs etc.

In the same way it was quite debatable over whether IBM should be forced to allow another company (Compaq) to make money using adverse interoperability and reverse engineering IBM's BIOS.

I'd argue that the second debate was settled in the right way, and am partial to Apple being forced to interoperate as well. If you run a service with more than, say, 5% of a market, and that market has a network lock-in effect, you should eventually be considered a public service and have to interoperate.

Pidgin / Blackberry Inbox / WP7 homescreen / Matrix bridges and other services that unify incoming and outgoing text and binary messages for 1x1/group chats should be table stakes, not selling points. Email and IM, whether on PC, mobile, XR, whatever, vendor agnostic!