[lolinder]

If you were a member of a monthly-subscription social network, would you feel entitled to your friends being allowed on for free? Should a gym be forced to allow you to bring friends? Surely you'd enjoy it more if you could exercise with your buddies, so what right do they have to insist that your buddies get their own memberships?

[dangus]

Is a free service something that has customers and non-customers?

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.

[pests]

That can all be factored in. By initially charging so much for the phone, it left value for the previous owner to recoup by selling it to you. Apple can (and I'm sure has) factored in these second hand sales, owners per iPhone, etc. They do have the stars to see how many iCloud accounts are created/used per device over it's lifetime.

[dangus]

I just thought of something else.

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.

[striking]

But that's not even my problem with it. I have a real iPhone, I have a real Mac. Why can't I get my messages from Apple using friends in a secure way on my Pixel without serious hackery?

[chongli]

You can: with Signal. It runs on both iOS and Android.

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?

[CoolGuySteve]

Why should Apple be in the business of providing a proprietary messaging service when many alternatives already exist in the market like you said.

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.

[chongli]

It's not an antitrust issue because Apple is not a monopoly. They have minority marketshare in all of the markets they operate.

[hattmall]

It's because of the bundling / capture with SMS. If they drop SMS from iMessage and make it clear to end users they are using a separate messaging service not part of their phone plan then there is no case. As long as they combine iMessage with the open standard SMS then it can be argued from a variety of anti-competitive angles. They have used SMS to gain users for iMessage and that's similar to the bundling of IE back in the 90s.

[chongli]

IE was a problem because Microsoft had monopoly marketshare (95% of PC sales included Windows back then). Apple does not have a monopoly. iPhones aren’t even half of all phone sales.

[commoner]

Counterpoint Research shows Apple at 53% of smartphone shipments in the U.S. during Q2 2022 - Q3 2023:

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.

[chongli]

The App Store is a separate issue. If you want to talk about opening that up, I'm game.

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.

[mashmac2]

Lots of companies have been forced to do provide free services to non-customers; consider almost any industry classified as a 'utility'. The question here is 'are message platforms a thing that should be classified and regulated as if it were a utility?'

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.

[chongli]

Lots of companies have been forced to do provide free services to non-customers; consider almost any industry classified as a 'utility'.

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!

[mikhailt]

> Lots of companies have been forced to do provide free services to non-customers; consider almost any industry classified as a 'utility'.

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.

[mikhailt]

Because you're using Apple's closed platform that only permits Apple-authorized clients that only exists on Apple devices. You're still bound by Apple's ToS for their services, nobody is entitled to unrestricted access to it. If Apple releases Messages for Android, that'd be them adding an approved client for their closed network.

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.

[throw0101b]

> Why can't I get my messages from Apple using friends in a secure way on my Pixel without serious hackery?

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?

[jlarocco]

> Why can't I get my messages from Apple using friends in a secure way on my Pixel without serious hackery?

Because you bought a product that doesn't allow that. In fact, goes out of its way to prohibit it.