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Comment by granzymes | Hacker News Reader

This case, at least as described in the article, has essentially no similarity to the Microsoft Internet Explorer trial (which, in case you forgot, Microsoft won on appeal).

Microsoft got in trouble for tying its monopoly in operating systems to OEMs preinstalling Internet Explorer. Essentially, they told OEMs that they would not sell them Windows unless they agreed to help Microsoft kill Netscape. That's a very different kind of antitrust complaint than what the article describes, which is Apple building seamless connections between its hardware and services while offering second-tier connections for competitors.

The Xcode angle is interesting, but likely not important enough for the Justice Department to sue over. Hardware for developers is negligible in the grand scheme of things.

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I think you make a great point. Still, the insidious way that Apple introduced iMessage is something right out of the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook that feels fundamentally wrong to me:

1. 15 years ago everyone in the US just used SMS to text between cell phones.

2. When iMessage came out, it wasn't like "Switch to iMessage!" Instead, it just was the default texting app you used with iPhone. So it replaced an existing, open standard with a closed one, but in a way where 99.9% of people didn't realize it.

3. In true "embrace, extend, extinguish" fashion, Apple added a lot of features to iMessage, but also didn't totally exclude Android users, but just made it seem to iOS users that when they got crappy photos or messages that randomly wouldn't deliver or crappy emoji responses "it was Android's fault".

Everything about the iMessage tactics (including getting teens to bully other teens for an out-group bubble color) is from the worst part of "protect the monopoly" playbook. Almost regardless of the legal nuances, I'm shocked when I hear anyone's broken logic trying to defend what they've done from a consumer utility perspective.

(One side note, yes, I fully know the situation outside the US isn't comparable due to the high cost of SMS in the late 00s in other countries that forced a migration to WhatsApp, etc. earlier. That still doesn't give Apple a break for their monopoly-preserving tactics in the US).

> including getting teens to bully other teens for an out-group bubble color

Whose messages turn green or blue depending on protocol in use in a given (potentially group) thread in Apple's Messages?

[EDIT] The up-and-down voting pattern suggests my point may not have come through: if you were trying to cause this, where would you place this indicator? On messages from the person with phone sending SMS, right? Apple places it on the iPhone user's messages that they send, to indicate what kind of message you've sent so you have some idea what the other end's experience will be, and why certain features may not appear in your UI (you don't need to see what kind of message is coming in—its capabilities are evident, whatever you see is the result of that message using whatever features it needed and could access)

Is Apple unhappy that Android users feel excluded? I doubt it. Was this feature evidently designed to do that, on purpose? I mean, if so, they didn't do it very well.

"Green bubble" became a thing, initially, because you'd add an Android users to a group text (actually iMessage) thread and it'd "green bubble" everyone else and make things work less-well. There had to be some kind of indicator so this wouldn't seem to happen just at random, and that was it—but the affordance pointedly does not single out who's responsible, indeed, in a group thread that starts out with mixed Android and iOS users, I'm not even sure how to tell who's a "green bubble" and who's a "blue bubble" (I suppose you'd tap each contact and see if iMessage-related features were available?)

oh right - as if a Billion users are forced to use iMessage </sarc>

edit an OS web browser tied to the base OS is not the same as an instant msg app on a phone. The OS Browser bundling is not at all comparable, by a long measure. Some context is needed on such a large situation.

source: read direct testimony on the MSFT anti-trust case

Serious question. How do you text on an iPhone without using iMessage?

I predominantly use Google Voice, but there are a slew of other alternative iOS SMS apps.

With SMS using the Messages app. iMessage is 100% optional and can be disabled.

Settings -> Messages -> Tap the "iMessage" toggle so it's off.

Don't even have to scroll to find it (at least on mine).

Again, I don't understand why people try to defend Apple's shitty behavior here. As I said in my comment, I'm less arguing from the technical legal details and more from a "this is just shitty, monopolistic-preserving behavior that serves no benefit besides protecting a company's marketshare" perspective. Apple could trivially easily:

1. Allow better interoperability from 3rd party clients. All of Apple's "user security" arguments are complete and total BS given that iMessage already degrades to the most insecure method of communication if any messages (including group chats) contain a non-iMessage user.

2. Provide a compatible Android client for iMessage (like literally every other single message app out there). At the very least they could stop breaking other iMessage Android clients.

3. Make it easier to choose a text client on startup.

4. Support a more functional interoperability standard - which, thankfully, Apple has finally said they will do by supporting RCS, but only after it looked like they became wary that their blatant tactics would look too monopolistic from a regulatory perspective.

There is just 0 user-centered rationale for defending Apple's behavior here.

> which, in case you forgot, Microsoft won on appeal

I was under the impression that Microsoft won in the sense that the punishment was undone, but merely due to procedural issues in the trial: that they seemed to have done the thing they weren't supposed to have done stood after the appeal.

> Ultimately, the Circuit Court overturned Jackson's holding that Microsoft should be broken up as an illegal monopoly. However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson's findings of fact, and held that traditional antitrust analysis was not equipped to consider software-related practices like browser tie-ins.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

Apple's behavior seems much more anticompetitive because, for example, they ban third parties from offering apps that interoperate e.g. with iMessage.

That's worlds worse than just making sure your app is the most convenient option, while other options can easily be installed.

There's a difference between obstructing (generally bad!) and refusal to deal (perfectly fine). Apple can't go out into the market and trip their competitors so they fall on their face. However, they are allowed to build themselves a nice road for their exclusive use on their own hardware and a winding dirt path for everyone else.

Put another way, Apple cannot worsen access for competitors on its platform absent a procompetitive justification. But they have no duty under U.S. antitrust law to provide equal access in the first place.

My understanding is they also ban third-party text message applications, but I could be confused on the details.

If Apple in 2020 had allowed third-party text message applications and in 2024 changed their mind because a competitor was eating their lunch, that would be anticompetitive.

It's not anticompetitive to never allow a third-party text message application in the first place.

I'm not aware of any requirement that anti-competitive behavior be in response to competitor behavior, but maybe you know more about the law.

For SMS? Maybe, but that's just a basic phone feature. An old Nokia also only offers one way to send SMS. It's just part of the phone-bits of the phone. And didn't Signal used to be able to send and receive SMS on iPhone, anyway? Thought it could.

Messaging apps that compete with iMessage are plentiful and Apple doesn't get in their way. You can also disable iMessage with a toggle on the Messages settings screen (it's well "above the fold" for me, fourth entry down, on that screen, it's the first thing they show other than security/permissions stuff for the app)

> And didn't Signal used to be able to send and receive SMS on iPhone, anyway? Thought it could.

On Android, yes. Not on iOS.

Oh, I thought they had it there too. Nevermind on that part then.

> But they have no duty under U.S. antitrust law to provide equal access in the first place.

True, but they're undeniably at a scale where this would just be expected of them either way. We broke up Ma Bell ignoring this exact defense, because at a certain scale of infrastructure you're expected to do the right thing legal or not. If Apple drills down on their "technically legal" defense, they're liable to find out how technically subjective law gets at their scale.

I agree that it's reasonable to hold platforms like Apple to a higher standard. The issue is that it would likely require new laws be passed, like the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act from the European Union.

That's not really an issue, as European lawmakers have demonstrated.

> That's worlds worse than just making sure your app is the most convenient option, while other options can easily be installed.

I disagree.

Apple is actively hostile to third parties integrating with their own protocols, but Microsoft has been caught several times trying to subvert standards for their benefit, e.g. when they added extensions to their Exchange email servers that would work only with Outlook clients.

You mean "Apple should be required to build messaging services on top of apple's infrastructure".

Google also prevents me from making a company that uses its search engine infrastructure and unlike iMessage it is actually the dominant operator in the market.

I'm also not allowed to make a Twitter-like service that interoperates with twitter.

Explain what makes iMessage, a service that is part of a product apple sells, different from the above? Or in fact any service operated by any other company that sells a product but doesn't allow other companies to resell their services?

> they ban third parties from offering apps that interoperate e.g. with iMessage.

If you're referring to that company that reverse engineered the iMessage protocol, that entire companies business model was "we're going to give away free access to a service that isn't free, and that a company has to spend money supporting".

Again, how would this be different from requiring google, twitter, or GitHub, etc to provide 3rd parties access to their infrastructure to duplicate their services?

iMessage's problem is that it is functionally an SMS replacement, but architecturally nothing like SMS. If you wanted to extend iMessage so that other companies could support and pay for their own hardware on it, you couldn't. It's not just Apple's willingness either, it's designed specifically so that it embraces and extends SMS without offering the same inter-OS connectivity.

Google and Twitter have services to run that compete on generally equal terms (eg. the Internet). Apple's messaging service is integrated with Apple's runtime, and because they control both they can implement features that competitors cannot.

you're right, it's not an sms replacement: it's actually secure, and it has no requirement that you have a sim or phone number. Something RCS does not have.

You can use SMS (and apparently RCS in future?) to talk to others, and if there's the option to use iMessage instead it does that. i.e it interoperates with existing standard messaging systems when appropriate.

> Apple's messaging service is integrated with Apple's runtime, and because they control both they can implement features that competitors cannot.

Every messaging app on Mac and iOS can implement whatever features they want, just like iMessage does. It has nothing to do with the being "part of the system".

> Google and Twitter have services to run that compete on generally equal terms (eg. the Internet)

No they don't. I can't make a search engine that competes with google I don't have the hardware or existing index, much like apple has infrastructure to support and developer iMessage, google has hardware and infrastructure to support search. Why should I have to build my own infrastructure if google already has that?

Similarly I can't make something that competes with twitter if I can't read and reply to tweets on twitter, so why shouldn't twitter be required to let me do that as well?

You have created an artificial distinction that makes iMessage (a service that is part of a paid product that requires significant infrastructure) somehow different from every other service operated by every other company for which someone might want to piggy back off to avoid paying the actual operational costs. There is no different from "I want to make my own messaging app that uses iMessage for message delivery so that it interacts with iMessage, so apple must let me do that" and "I want to make a microblogging site that uses twitter's infrastructure so that it can interact with twitter, so twitter must let me do that".

> You have created an artificial distinction that makes iMessage [...] somehow different from every other service

Did I? Or did Apple?

Apple is the one that baked support for it into their SMS app. Apple is the party that designed iMessage to solely rely on Apple servers instead of extending to third-party instances or carrier partners. I'm willing to give Apple a fair shake here, but their approach is undeniably predatory. They are an enormous portion of the first-world smartphone market, and their ivory tower approach to communications is historically untenable.

Personally speaking, I despise RCS as a protocol but at least it acknowledged third-party interop as a necessary component of... you know, agnostic communication infrastructure. You'd hope that a company like Apple would annihilate Google in this arena, but instead they're silent. The largest company in the world, which built it's entire business on revolutionizing the phone, has nothing to give back to public communication infrastructure. They won't even come to the discussion table for future protocols unless regulators threaten them.

Apple's entire modern business is built on making artificial distinctions between themselves and their competitors. That's why the DMA exists; Apple doesn't have the right to access a market where they deny their competitors fair competition. They don't have to forfeit every advantage they have, just the ones deemed anticompetitive. Since Apple has refused to negotiate on this in the past, it stands to reason that government intervention it the only way to make consumers lives (on both sides of the walled garden) better.

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