Aware or not, "you can go somewhere else" is not a valid excuse from being regulated - that rests solely on whether what is being done is deemed fair play by pe

Aware or not, "you can go somewhere else" is not a valid excuse from being regulated - that rests solely on whether what is being done is deemed fair play by people. E.g. hanging the price of gas mid pump is not considered fair play and is regulated regardless if people can go to the other gas station in town and deal with whatever weird operations they have instead. Whether there are more beneficiaries than advertisers or other mega companies is another easy one to answer: sure, people benefit more than advertisers/epic/etc by being able to use RCS (or hopefully iMessage) across platforms, as do other areas of opening up the Apple ecosystem. Does this hold in every case of opening up anything? Probably not, e.g. requiring the permissions model be allowed to have alternatives would very likely benefit shady actors a lot but the users extremely little. Your last point is, in my opinion, the much more lively and core debate: at which point is the ecosystem opened the right amount? For me, still a bit farther than this, but not infinitely open. As for which brand ecosystem for me: all the above. Windows for home, Linux+macOS for work, iPhone for phone, Android for tablet.