[Dioxide2119]

> 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!

[JoshTriplett]

> 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.

I would love to see iMessage available to people not on Apple devices.

However, I am not enthusiastic about a government defining what "interoperate" means in general. By way of example, I can think of many definitions of "interoperate" that would prevent the use of end-to-end encryption, or prevent upgrading the protocol and not supporting old versions, or prevent fixing security issues because some third-party client was relying on the insecure behavior, or prevent setting requirements on acceptable client behavior...

I want interoperability. I don't want to end up in a world in which, once you get large enough, it's impossible to innovate without slowing down and waiting for the slowest and most recalcitrant/adversarial folks who want to interoperate with you to catch up.

[zug_zug]

> 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.

I think this would create a whole new generation of tech startups in a stalled/captured industry.

[kevingadd]

fwiw in this case iMessage is easily funded by all the profit Apple earns off of iPhone/iPad sales, app store 30%, and iCloud subscriptions. It's not as if Apple is being forced to let millions of Android users communicate with each other for free over iMessage - Beeper exists because people want to communicate with Apple's customers, who already paid them money.

[valec]

Ok, then sell it as a service. Say $3/mo.