That's worlds worse than just making sure your app is the most convenient option, while other options can easily be installed.
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.
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.
It's not anticompetitive to never allow a third-party text message application in the first place.
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)
On Android, yes. Not on iOS.
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?
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 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".
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.
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.