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How is this an actionable anti-trust issue? iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally. In the US is it dwarfe

How is this an actionable anti-trust issue? iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally. In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms. Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service? The purpose of anti-trust is to increase competition and prevent unlawful monopolies. Apple is a flea on the tail of an ox when it comes to messaging, as capable of influencing the market as I am.

Xenoamorphous 3y ago
> In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms Maybe because it comes preinstalled?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sroussey 3y ago
  This makes no sense. “Because it comes preinstalled it is dwarfed by at least three other platforms”??
- cstrahan 3y ago
  Which other 3 platforms come preinstalled? Edit: wait, are you talking about iMessage being preinstalled? If so, how does iMessage being preinstalled make it dwarfed by other non-preinstalled platforms? Are you suggesting it’s human nature to use third party apps, or maybe you mistook the meaning of “dwarfed by”?
- cmiles74 3y ago
  I am very curious what three other messaging application are available on iOS and have more market share than Apple Messages! Nearly every member of my family has an iPhone and they all use Apple Messages.
  - Psyonic 3y ago
    Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram maybe Discord, FB Messenger
    - cmiles74 3y ago
      I started looking around, I can find charts that show messaging app market share on iOS but none of them include Apple Messages. For sure Apple doesn't share these numbers, it looks like no one else has gone through the trouble to collect them.
      - sbuk 3y ago
        They do supply the number of active iOS devices, though it doesn't necessarilly mean that they are all active iMessage users. 136 million iPhones in the US, ~140 million active Facebook Messenger users in the the US.
        hifreq 3y ago
        We can assume that there are close to zero iPhone owners who don't use Messages, considering that almost half of the US population has an iPhone. This calculation fails to account for the critical aspect: Messages is the default SMS app, it's not just a group chat. Comparing it to WhatsApp is just incorrect.
        sbuk 3y ago
        If it's the default app and all iPhone users actively use it, and FB messenger beats it by 4 million active users, then your argument hasn't really got a leg to stand on, especially given that the market share for iPhone in the US is ~53%.
        hifreq 3y ago
        My argument is only strengthened by your data?.. Messages app is the app every iPhone user uses to send and receive SMS messages. It's not about some exclusive features, blue vs green bubbles, etc. It's just SMS messages. So just citing the number (130M) means nothing in this debate. WhatsApp or Signal or FM Messenger are not SMS apps, so we can't just look at the number of active users and make conclusions. How many angsty teenagers must have an iPhone because of the color of their chat bubble? That's the number that (apparently) matters.
tapoxi 3y ago
Aren't 70% of American teenagers on iPhone because of the iMessage network effects? The whole "green bubble" shaming issue.
- Justsignedup 3y ago
  its more than a shame. emoji, gifs and images are a core part of teens' communications (I have one, I know all too well), and iMessage's green bubble is also a guarantee that these things won't work, so its not just a shame, it is a hard road block. Fortunately a lot of teens moved to discord.
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    Based on all the messages I get from my work colleagues (mostly android users much more into memes and things than I am), gifs and emojis and other features work just fine these days with MMS messaging on iPhone.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      videos taken on your or their phones don't show up postage stamp sized and blurry/bricky any more? that's usually how a green bubble drags an iphone group down although the "liked your message" type stuff is also annoying.
      - lazycouchpotato 3y ago
        Google thankfully added a workaround/fix for that. "Liked your message" shows up as a reaction on Google Messages. https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/10/googles-message-app-can-now-handle-imessage-reactions-challenges-apple-with-new-features/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/10/googles-message-app-can-no... In fact, the role's been reversed - the iPhone user now gets the "liked your message" text message while on Google Messages it shows up as a reaction.
    - canucker2016 3y ago
      When iMessage has to send a pic or vid to a group that contains non-iMessage recipients, iMessage will fallback to MMS and may need to recompress the pic/vid to get under the MMS media limit. MMS, introduced in 2002, has much lower limits for pictures/video than if the messaging apps were to send the media over data/internet. Also these MMS media limits aren't hardcoded, the limits are set by the sending and receiving carriers. see https://www.androidpolice.com/why-text-message-videos-look-blurry-how-to-fix/ https://www.androidpolice.com/why-text-message-videos-look-b...
jtriangle 3y ago
So "monopoly" as a single entity controlling a single market is a simplistic view of the issue at hand. Anti-trust is far broader than that, where any anticompetitive action can be subject to anti-trust lawsuits/regulatory action. So the legal argument would be that, because Apple allows for a single messaging app, and interacting with that app requires an iphone, they're effectively preventing messaging app competition. Apple has a very, very talented legal team though, so, for this to even see argument in court someone's going to have to realllly have to want it, and be able to fund it.
- laserlight 3y ago
  > Apple allows for a single messaging app Do you mean that Apple doesn't allow third-party SMS apps? Because there are lots of messaging apps on iOS.
  - cmiles74 3y ago
    IMHO, the argument is that Apple does not allow any third party messaging app to send message to the built-in messaging application (Apple Messages) on the iPhone. That is Apple ships one messaging app that is the default and may not be removed, and they also do not allow any interoperability with that one messaging application. Apple Messages is not an SMS application; it's an internet messaging application that falls back to SMS messages when communicating with any non-iOS device. There are some situations where there may be no data network and, maybe, it falls back to sending an SMS message to another iOS device but this is pretty rare.
  - evilduck 3y ago
    They don't know what they mean, because there isn't a legal precedent for narrowly defining monopolies to facets of a single company's stores and platforms. It's just wishful thinking phrased authoritatively.
- dickersnoodle 3y ago
  >So the legal argument would be that, because Apple allows for a single messaging app, and interacting with that app requires an iphone, they're effectively preventing messaging app competition. That is weapons-grade horseshit. You can put WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Signal on your iPhone and message to your heart's content. (I know, because I've had the first two on my phone before and they did not get killed in their sleep by Apple's native messaging app).
r3trohack3r 3y ago
> iMessage … messaging platform For me, personally, it’s an SMS app not general messaging. And on iOS there is absolutely no competition for SMS by design. I suspect iMessage would enjoy far less adoption if the iMessage features were a separate application from the SMS features, or if a 3rd party app could assume the role of handling SMS (I.E. Signal). If Signal were allowed to handle SMS on an iPhone, ditching iMessage would be one of the first things I’d do when setting up my device. On iOS, if I want to send a message to a phone number using a cross-platform protocol that (nearly?) all cellphones understand by default without coordinating a separate communication channel out-of-band, my option is: iMessage. That is not organic, it’s Apple using its position as the device manufacturer to force all competition out of the SMS space, and then offering a “progressive enhancement” on top of an open protocol that nobody else can compete with or interopt with.
- dwaite 3y ago
  Slight correction - you can't (or rather, shouldn't) override the SMS handling on an android phone. Instead what an app like Signal does is request all the permissions it can from the SMS/MMS handling service of the phone - to read and send SMS entries, and to get events on an incoming SMS, and then request to be the default handler of the `sms` custom URI scheme. But you can have any number of SMS clients at once. It is likely if Apple Messages ever came to Android, it would do the same thing - otherwise, the fallback behavior (when talking to an android user without the app installed, for example) would be sub-par.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service? The top messaging services are SMS and email. Do these allow different companies to interoperate with each other? Yes, of course. And so should all messaging apps, regardless of how many other messaging apps there are, because they all have a network effect. They're segmented into their own markets by the act of restricting interoperability. There is no carrier with a monopoly on SMS but Apple is trying to maintain a monopoly on iMessage. Why should that be allowed for anyone? Restricting interoperability -- i.e. competition -- is not a legitimate business practice.
- junofan 3y ago
  I dunno, fixing the market to be “company X’s own services” doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of antitrust laws. Should I be allowed to sell gasoline at Shell’s gas stations?
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    You should be able to sell your gasoline to customers with Ford's cars, regardless of whether or not Ford has their own gas stations. But why are we reaching for a car analogy? Should gmail or google.com be able to block Firefox and force you to use Chrome? Not make use of some feature Chrome has, but just purposely block Firefox even if it supports that feature or its users are content to use the service without it.
cmiles74 3y ago
How is Apple Messages not the #1 most popular messaging application on the iPhone? I know many people that use an iPhone and they all use Apple Messages. I know because I have an Android phone and this is the only way to communicate with them.
- rezonant 3y ago
  There seems to be a huge disconnect from people who are in countries where texting is not dominant. In the US (and apparently the UK) that is not the case, and iMessage and texting more broadly are overwhelmingly dominant from all indicators I've seen.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> How is this an actionable anti-trust issue? How is this less of an issue than Microsoft integrating Internet Explorer with Windows back in the day? The shit Google and Apple seem to be getting away with these days would make regulators of yore spin in their graves.
- gafage 3y ago
  It is less of an issue because of market share. MS crushed Netscape with IE. imessage is not used in the EU
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Does this mean that existence of Android allows both Google and Apple to mutually shield themselves from antitrust accusations? They basically get to do what they want, and argue "us refusing to give you X is not antitrust-relevant, because there's the other 50% of the market that refuses to give you X in an entirely different way".
    - gafage 3y ago
      This has nothing to do with android. iphone comes with an app store and that app store contains lots of messenger applications. Users overwhelmingly download one or several messenger applications from the store and use them instead of imessage. What's the similarity to IE here? IE had over 90% of browser share at some point.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Integration. None of the alternative messaging apps are first parties on iOS. Just like IE, for a moment, was the only first-party browser on Windows.
        gafage 3y ago
        I don't see any practical difference between whatsapp and imessage. iphone has so many apis such as callkit that make apps that use them feel like first parties. I think the only real difference is that you can use the built-in messages to read and send sms... which nobody uses anymore.
acaloiar 3y ago
I'm not a lawyer. But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic. Apple's behavior is not significantly different from Microsoft's, which instigated US v. Microsoft [1]. That case largely took issue with Microsoft's mandatory bundling of IE with Windows and the extent to which Microsoft created an inorganic monopoly. In addition to how Microsoft's monopoly came to be one, the judge also took issue with Microsoft's methodology in quashing threats to that monopoly. One could claim that Apple is taking similar quashing action relative to Beeper now. Microsoft of course appealed the judgement, and prevailed. But they prevailed only because the judge had broken his code of conduct in discussing the case with media; not because Microsoft's behavior was not monopolistic. I don't believe global or domestic iMessenger usage is relevant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
- stouset 3y ago
  > I'm not a lawyer. > But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic. In order for antitrust laws to apply, it’s not enough to exhibit monopolistic behavior. You actually have to be a monopoly and use this behavior to achieve and/or retain it.
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    > You actually have to be a monopoly Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony — Sherman Act, Section 2
  - tzs 3y ago
    That's not the whole story in the United States. Antitrust law prohibits monopolization, which is monopoly power couple with anticompetitive practices, but it also prohibits various practices from companies that do not have monopoly power. For example the Sherman Act prohibits attempted monopolization. You run afoul of that for anticompetitive conduct and a specific intent to monopolize if there is a dangerous probability that will achieve monopoly power. The Clayton Act added restrictions on price discrimination, exclusive dealing, tying, and mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce competition or tend to create monopolies.
Miner49er 3y ago
What dwarfs iMessage in the US? I would assume that it is the most used messaging platform in the country.
- sbuk 3y ago
  Facebook Messenger - approx 140 million users, then WhatsApp at approx 75 million. iOS has approx 136 million users (not sure if that includes iPad). So "dwarfs" might be a bit extreme. However, its extremely unlikely that all the iOS users use iMessage and none use either Facebook or WhatsApp. Statista has the figures, but I'm not going to pay $149 per month to find out more! Source: Googling around, so take it for what it is!
  - Miner49er 3y ago
    With this numbers I would still guess that iMessage has WhatsApp beat. I would also guess it does more volume then FB Messenger, even if it technically has less users.
    - sbuk 3y ago
      How? 140 > 136! And the figure reported are active users. I accept it's back-of-the-napkin, not trustworthy sources, but even so, your math just doesn't make sense.
      - Miner49er 3y ago
        I'm just speculating that iMessage users use the app more then FB messenger users use FB messenger. I don't think there's anyway to know, so I definitely might be wrong.
  - quantumsequoia 3y ago
    Many Americans have Facebook/WhatsApp accounts they haven't used in years. I'd be skeptical they surpass iMessage in terms of volume of messages
rezonant 3y ago
> In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms. Do you have a source for this?
progval 3y ago
> iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally. It doesn't matter what the users think. However, the EU Commission agrees with you here, as it explicitly decided that iMessage doesn't fall under the DMA: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4328 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_... ("gateway" is one of the three conditions to be a gatekeeper, see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32022R1925#d1e1494-1-1 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... )
grishka 3y ago
> Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service? The one I know a lot about — Telegram — has official public protocol docs and is fully open to third-party clients: https://core.telegram.org https://core.telegram.org
Miner49er 3y ago
Not allowing interop makes it harder for new competitors, because no one is going to use a messaging app that no one else uses.
fomine3 3y ago
My opinion from the beginning * Platform dependent messanger is a terrible idea, but perhaps anyone have right to implement legal terrible idea. * Why the US people widely adopt terrible idea? It's terrible as designed. * Although, since it's widely adopted in the US, it should be opened, maybe. EU won't help because they don't adopt terrible idea.

Xenoamorphous 3y ago

> In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms Maybe because it comes preinstalled?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sroussey 3y ago
This makes no sense. “Because it comes preinstalled it is dwarfed by at least three other platforms”??
cstrahan 3y ago
Which other 3 platforms come preinstalled? Edit: wait, are you talking about iMessage being preinstalled? If so, how does iMessage being preinstalled make it dwarfed by other non-preinstalled platforms? Are you suggesting it’s human nature to use third party apps, or maybe you mistook the meaning of “dwarfed by”?
cmiles74 3y ago
I am very curious what three other messaging application are available on iOS and have more market share than Apple Messages! Nearly every member of my family has an iPhone and they all use Apple Messages.
- Psyonic 3y ago
  Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram maybe Discord, FB Messenger
  - cmiles74 3y ago
    I started looking around, I can find charts that show messaging app market share on iOS but none of them include Apple Messages. For sure Apple doesn't share these numbers, it looks like no one else has gone through the trouble to collect them.
    - sbuk 3y ago
      They do supply the number of active iOS devices, though it doesn't necessarilly mean that they are all active iMessage users. 136 million iPhones in the US, ~140 million active Facebook Messenger users in the the US.
      - hifreq 3y ago
        We can assume that there are close to zero iPhone owners who don't use Messages, considering that almost half of the US population has an iPhone. This calculation fails to account for the critical aspect: Messages is the default SMS app, it's not just a group chat. Comparing it to WhatsApp is just incorrect.
        sbuk 3y ago
        If it's the default app and all iPhone users actively use it, and FB messenger beats it by 4 million active users, then your argument hasn't really got a leg to stand on, especially given that the market share for iPhone in the US is ~53%.
        hifreq 3y ago
        My argument is only strengthened by your data?.. Messages app is the app every iPhone user uses to send and receive SMS messages. It's not about some exclusive features, blue vs green bubbles, etc. It's just SMS messages. So just citing the number (130M) means nothing in this debate. WhatsApp or Signal or FM Messenger are not SMS apps, so we can't just look at the number of active users and make conclusions. How many angsty teenagers must have an iPhone because of the color of their chat bubble? That's the number that (apparently) matters.

tapoxi 3y ago

Aren't 70% of American teenagers on iPhone because of the iMessage network effects? The whole "green bubble" shaming issue.

Justsignedup 3y ago
its more than a shame. emoji, gifs and images are a core part of teens' communications (I have one, I know all too well), and iMessage's green bubble is also a guarantee that these things won't work, so its not just a shame, it is a hard road block. Fortunately a lot of teens moved to discord.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  Based on all the messages I get from my work colleagues (mostly android users much more into memes and things than I am), gifs and emojis and other features work just fine these days with MMS messaging on iPhone.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    videos taken on your or their phones don't show up postage stamp sized and blurry/bricky any more? that's usually how a green bubble drags an iphone group down although the "liked your message" type stuff is also annoying.
    - lazycouchpotato 3y ago
      Google thankfully added a workaround/fix for that. "Liked your message" shows up as a reaction on Google Messages. https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/10/googles-message-app-can-now-handle-imessage-reactions-challenges-apple-with-new-features/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/10/googles-message-app-can-no... In fact, the role's been reversed - the iPhone user now gets the "liked your message" text message while on Google Messages it shows up as a reaction.
  - canucker2016 3y ago
    When iMessage has to send a pic or vid to a group that contains non-iMessage recipients, iMessage will fallback to MMS and may need to recompress the pic/vid to get under the MMS media limit. MMS, introduced in 2002, has much lower limits for pictures/video than if the messaging apps were to send the media over data/internet. Also these MMS media limits aren't hardcoded, the limits are set by the sending and receiving carriers. see https://www.androidpolice.com/why-text-message-videos-look-blurry-how-to-fix/ https://www.androidpolice.com/why-text-message-videos-look-b...

jtriangle 3y ago

So "monopoly" as a single entity controlling a single market is a simplistic view of the issue at hand. Anti-trust is far broader than that, where any anticompetitive action can be subject to anti-trust lawsuits/regulatory action. So the legal argument would be that, because Apple allows for a single messaging app, and interacting with that app requires an iphone, they're effectively preventing messaging app competition. Apple has a very, very talented legal team though, so, for this to even see argument in court someone's going to have to realllly have to want it, and be able to fund it.

laserlight 3y ago
> Apple allows for a single messaging app Do you mean that Apple doesn't allow third-party SMS apps? Because there are lots of messaging apps on iOS.
- cmiles74 3y ago
  IMHO, the argument is that Apple does not allow any third party messaging app to send message to the built-in messaging application (Apple Messages) on the iPhone. That is Apple ships one messaging app that is the default and may not be removed, and they also do not allow any interoperability with that one messaging application. Apple Messages is not an SMS application; it's an internet messaging application that falls back to SMS messages when communicating with any non-iOS device. There are some situations where there may be no data network and, maybe, it falls back to sending an SMS message to another iOS device but this is pretty rare.
- evilduck 3y ago
  They don't know what they mean, because there isn't a legal precedent for narrowly defining monopolies to facets of a single company's stores and platforms. It's just wishful thinking phrased authoritatively.
dickersnoodle 3y ago
>So the legal argument would be that, because Apple allows for a single messaging app, and interacting with that app requires an iphone, they're effectively preventing messaging app competition. That is weapons-grade horseshit. You can put WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Signal on your iPhone and message to your heart's content. (I know, because I've had the first two on my phone before and they did not get killed in their sleep by Apple's native messaging app).

r3trohack3r 3y ago

> iMessage … messaging platform For me, personally, it’s an SMS app not general messaging. And on iOS there is absolutely no competition for SMS by design. I suspect iMessage would enjoy far less adoption if the iMessage features were a separate application from the SMS features, or if a 3rd party app could assume the role of handling SMS (I.E. Signal). If Signal were allowed to handle SMS on an iPhone, ditching iMessage would be one of the first things I’d do when setting up my device. On iOS, if I want to send a message to a phone number using a cross-platform protocol that (nearly?) all cellphones understand by default without coordinating a separate communication channel out-of-band, my option is: iMessage. That is not organic, it’s Apple using its position as the device manufacturer to force all competition out of the SMS space, and then offering a “progressive enhancement” on top of an open protocol that nobody else can compete with or interopt with.

dwaite 3y ago
Slight correction - you can't (or rather, shouldn't) override the SMS handling on an android phone. Instead what an app like Signal does is request all the permissions it can from the SMS/MMS handling service of the phone - to read and send SMS entries, and to get events on an incoming SMS, and then request to be the default handler of the `sms` custom URI scheme. But you can have any number of SMS clients at once. It is likely if Apple Messages ever came to Android, it would do the same thing - otherwise, the fallback behavior (when talking to an android user without the app installed, for example) would be sub-par.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service? The top messaging services are SMS and email. Do these allow different companies to interoperate with each other? Yes, of course. And so should all messaging apps, regardless of how many other messaging apps there are, because they all have a network effect. They're segmented into their own markets by the act of restricting interoperability. There is no carrier with a monopoly on SMS but Apple is trying to maintain a monopoly on iMessage. Why should that be allowed for anyone? Restricting interoperability -- i.e. competition -- is not a legitimate business practice.

junofan 3y ago
I dunno, fixing the market to be “company X’s own services” doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of antitrust laws. Should I be allowed to sell gasoline at Shell’s gas stations?
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  You should be able to sell your gasoline to customers with Ford's cars, regardless of whether or not Ford has their own gas stations. But why are we reaching for a car analogy? Should gmail or google.com be able to block Firefox and force you to use Chrome? Not make use of some feature Chrome has, but just purposely block Firefox even if it supports that feature or its users are content to use the service without it.

cmiles74 3y ago

How is Apple Messages not the #1 most popular messaging application on the iPhone? I know many people that use an iPhone and they all use Apple Messages. I know because I have an Android phone and this is the only way to communicate with them.

rezonant 3y ago
There seems to be a huge disconnect from people who are in countries where texting is not dominant. In the US (and apparently the UK) that is not the case, and iMessage and texting more broadly are overwhelmingly dominant from all indicators I've seen.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> How is this an actionable anti-trust issue? How is this less of an issue than Microsoft integrating Internet Explorer with Windows back in the day? The shit Google and Apple seem to be getting away with these days would make regulators of yore spin in their graves.

gafage 3y ago
It is less of an issue because of market share. MS crushed Netscape with IE. imessage is not used in the EU
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Does this mean that existence of Android allows both Google and Apple to mutually shield themselves from antitrust accusations? They basically get to do what they want, and argue "us refusing to give you X is not antitrust-relevant, because there's the other 50% of the market that refuses to give you X in an entirely different way".
  - gafage 3y ago
    This has nothing to do with android. iphone comes with an app store and that app store contains lots of messenger applications. Users overwhelmingly download one or several messenger applications from the store and use them instead of imessage. What's the similarity to IE here? IE had over 90% of browser share at some point.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Integration. None of the alternative messaging apps are first parties on iOS. Just like IE, for a moment, was the only first-party browser on Windows.
      - gafage 3y ago
        I don't see any practical difference between whatsapp and imessage. iphone has so many apis such as callkit that make apps that use them feel like first parties. I think the only real difference is that you can use the built-in messages to read and send sms... which nobody uses anymore.

acaloiar 3y ago

I'm not a lawyer. But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic. Apple's behavior is not significantly different from Microsoft's, which instigated US v. Microsoft [1]. That case largely took issue with Microsoft's mandatory bundling of IE with Windows and the extent to which Microsoft created an inorganic monopoly. In addition to how Microsoft's monopoly came to be one, the judge also took issue with Microsoft's methodology in quashing threats to that monopoly. One could claim that Apple is taking similar quashing action relative to Beeper now. Microsoft of course appealed the judgement, and prevailed. But they prevailed only because the judge had broken his code of conduct in discussing the case with media; not because Microsoft's behavior was not monopolistic. I don't believe global or domestic iMessenger usage is relevant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

stouset 3y ago
> I'm not a lawyer. > But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic. In order for antitrust laws to apply, it’s not enough to exhibit monopolistic behavior. You actually have to be a monopoly and use this behavior to achieve and/or retain it.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  > You actually have to be a monopoly Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony — Sherman Act, Section 2
- tzs 3y ago
  That's not the whole story in the United States. Antitrust law prohibits monopolization, which is monopoly power couple with anticompetitive practices, but it also prohibits various practices from companies that do not have monopoly power. For example the Sherman Act prohibits attempted monopolization. You run afoul of that for anticompetitive conduct and a specific intent to monopolize if there is a dangerous probability that will achieve monopoly power. The Clayton Act added restrictions on price discrimination, exclusive dealing, tying, and mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce competition or tend to create monopolies.

Miner49er 3y ago

What dwarfs iMessage in the US? I would assume that it is the most used messaging platform in the country.

sbuk 3y ago
Facebook Messenger - approx 140 million users, then WhatsApp at approx 75 million. iOS has approx 136 million users (not sure if that includes iPad). So "dwarfs" might be a bit extreme. However, its extremely unlikely that all the iOS users use iMessage and none use either Facebook or WhatsApp. Statista has the figures, but I'm not going to pay $149 per month to find out more! Source: Googling around, so take it for what it is!
- Miner49er 3y ago
  With this numbers I would still guess that iMessage has WhatsApp beat. I would also guess it does more volume then FB Messenger, even if it technically has less users.
  - sbuk 3y ago
    How? 140 > 136! And the figure reported are active users. I accept it's back-of-the-napkin, not trustworthy sources, but even so, your math just doesn't make sense.
    - Miner49er 3y ago
      I'm just speculating that iMessage users use the app more then FB messenger users use FB messenger. I don't think there's anyway to know, so I definitely might be wrong.
- quantumsequoia 3y ago
  Many Americans have Facebook/WhatsApp accounts they haven't used in years. I'd be skeptical they surpass iMessage in terms of volume of messages

rezonant 3y ago

> In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms. Do you have a source for this?

progval 3y ago

> iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally. It doesn't matter what the users think. However, the EU Commission agrees with you here, as it explicitly decided that iMessage doesn't fall under the DMA: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4328 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_... ("gateway" is one of the three conditions to be a gatekeeper, see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32022R1925#d1e1494-1-1 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... )

grishka 3y ago

> Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service? The one I know a lot about — Telegram — has official public protocol docs and is fully open to third-party clients: https://core.telegram.org https://core.telegram.org

Miner49er 3y ago

Not allowing interop makes it harder for new competitors, because no one is going to use a messaging app that no one else uses.

fomine3 3y ago

My opinion from the beginning * Platform dependent messanger is a terrible idea, but perhaps anyone have right to implement legal terrible idea. * Why the US people widely adopt terrible idea? It's terrible as designed. * Although, since it's widely adopted in the US, it should be opened, maybe. EU won't help because they don't adopt terrible idea.