[misnome]

US? When has that ever happened in the last 30 years? I’d buy the EU stepping in to mandate interoperability though. I’d welcome that!

But… shouldn’t mostly everyone here view needing the EU to force the behaviour of a US company kind of against the entire supposed benefit of the US system and the purpose of the domain this forum is hosted on?

[petemir]

> US? When has that ever happened in the last 30 years?

United States vs. Microsoft Corp, 2001? [0]

And ongoing: United States vs. Google LLC (2020) [1] and United States vs Google LLC (2023) [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

Edited: formatting

[misnome]

> United States vs. Microsoft Corp, 2001? [0]

As the wikipedia page you yourself are citing, overturned on appeal.

> And ongoing: United States vs. Google LLC (2020) [1] and United States vs Google LLC (2023) [2].

Ongoing, so a bit hard to count these as evidence of successful market regulation.

[FireBeyond]

> As the wikipedia page you yourself are citing, overturned on appeal.

So the law says "Don't do behavior X", the government takes you to court, there is a judgment, you appeal, and win the appeal.

I'm not sure "dismissed on appeal" means "this isn't working as intended".

Successful market regulation includes investigating issues, prosecuting them where there is reasonable grounds to do so and it also includes a determination (either in investigation or in court) that something is not an issue.

[jimbob45]

Overturned on appeal but MS was fined heavily over the years using the same justification. The one I remember off the top of my head was the WMP fine[0].

If you have an OS, everything within should be open for competition and courts have generally ruled as such for years.

[0]https://www.npr.org/2007/09/17/14465160/eu-court-defeats-mic...

[mschuster91]

> But… shouldn’t mostly everyone here view needing the EU to force the behaviour of a US company kind of against the entire supposed benefit of the US system and the purpose of the domain this forum is hosted on?

European here. From my POV it seems as if the USA have forgotten that for a truly free market to exist, there needs to be serious oversight to prevent capitalism from devolving into "corporate Darwinism" - aka the strong ones staying strong because they (b)eat all the competition by being so strong in the first place or because they impose their externalities upon everyone else.

There is many an argument to be had if a free-market system is better than one more oriented on the government running things (obviously, I'm in the latter camp), but the problem is y'all don't have a free market at that point.

[misnome]

Also European^wfrom the european area (I think you get lynched here if you say that after brexit), and I completely agree. But it seems an awful lot of USian cheer for “free markets” only when it is giving the specific outcome they personally want, and I think you should mostly approach these “US Company” issues without the expectation of a Europarliament-ex-machina solution.

[doublepg23]

Where are you coming up with these theories?

A capitalist economy needs the government for some very key laws like upholding private property rights but how does that extend to "mandating interoperable message systems"?

[Sohcahtoa82]

The definition of "free market" includes being free from monopolies.

If the government wants to maintain a free market, that means they need to step in and prevent monopolies, which includes preventing anti-competitive behavior.

Apple is being very anti-competitive with iMessage. It's not just the blocking of Android clients, but the fact that Apple will not let you use any other SMS app on iPhone, so users are locked into iMessage.

[zappb]

The government has done a dandy job enabling tech monopolies by making copyright and patent law so draconian.

[mschuster91]

> Where are you coming up with these theories?

By simply looking at the general state of the US economy that has lost competition across the board over the last decades as large companies consolidated to form extremely large behemoths that dominate their respective markets (e.g. Boeing for aircraft, Microsoft for computer operating systems and office software, Meta for social media, Walmart for groceries, Google for search, Cargill/Tyson/JBS in agriculture, AA/Delta/Southwest/United in airlines), use both legal and illegal (such as wage collusion) tactics to cement their marketshare, and extract ruinously low purchase prices from their vendors. This shit used to be different, with lots of competition and resulting innovation, not even a few decades ago.

> A capitalist economy needs the government for some very key laws like upholding private property rights but how does that extend to "mandating interoperable message systems"?

Easy. Apple has a very popular product that they (ab)use to push its users to push their friends to get themselves iPhones. Breaking up their stronghold over iMessage would allow Android users to communicate on their devices with people who own iPhones, and it would lead to a flurry of competing messenger applications.

[chipgap98]

How would interoperability and end to end encryption work together?

[mschuster91]

The same way HTTP+SSL/TLS or OpenPGP/SMIME work: by standardization. No matter if you run Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, cURL or your own client, you can connect with end-to-end encryption to any HTTP server with any kind of SSL frontend. For email, it's just the same - any client communicating with any other client implementing the respective standard can do so with e2e encryption.

[cmiles74]

There's no technical reason why services could not interoperate and still provide end-to-end encryption.

[QuercusMax]

Many of us on this site think modern hypercapitalism, the US system, and VC financing are basically evils, and are here for the general tech content. US regulators have been captured by monied interests, so rooting for the EU to do the job the US government won't is the best we can currently hope for.