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When Ma Bell didn't let people use third-party phones with their service, the government made them change their ways. Why is the government letting Apple get aw
by josephcsible 3y ago
When Ma Bell didn't let people use third-party phones with their service, the government made them change their ways. Why is the government letting Apple get away with the equivalent?
- stouset 3y agoMa Bell had a monopoly. This is one messaging app on one brand of phone. Nothing stops you from using another phone, or multiple or other messaging apps. And messaging apps aren’t restricted by a “default” in quite the same way a web browser is. I have friends on WhatsApp and Signal and Instagram and I message them all without any appreciable difference in effort.
- josephcsible 3y agoAs long as iMessage doesn't support federation, Apple has a monopoly on it too. If not, then Ma Bell wouldn't have had a monopoly either, since you could say mailing letters was a competitor to telephones.
- madeofpalk 3y agoThat's nonsensical. Reddit has a monopoly on Reddit - of course it does. Any service online is under no obligation to allow for widespread interpoperation - that would be madness.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> Any service online is under no obligation to allow for widespread interpoperation - that would be madness. Lol, "madness". The Digital Services Act in the EU would like a word.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nicce 3y agoYou are confusing with Digital Markets Act. https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en
- GeekyBear 3y agoAlthough the final determination is not yet locked in, the word is that Bing and iMessage have been found to not be popular enough in the EU to fall under the DMA. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-06/apple-imessage-set-to-avoid-eu-s-digital-dominance-crackdown https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-06/apple-ime...
- nicce 3y agoYou can see full list of current decisions here without paywall: https://digital-markets-act-cases.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers https://digital-markets-act-cases.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers
- unyttigfjelltol 3y agoIt's madness for monopolistic communications providers to refuse interoperability.
- madeofpalk 3y agoiMessage is far from monopolistic. Messages on iPhone is interoperable with any other mobile device - it supports SMS!
- V-eHGsd_ 3y ago> it supports SMS! and isn't RCS support coming too?
- tedunangst 3y agoAnd here you are, posting on a site with a monopoly on HN comments.
- justapassenger 3y ago[dead]
- bscphil 3y agoYou can run that argument the other way. It's desirable for there to be only one system of phone lines installed everywhere, where anyone with a telephone number can call anyone else. It would be desirable for there to be only one e2e encrypted "double-ratchet" messaging protocol, for the same reasons. In the case of Bell, the universal lines already existed, the problem was that Bell owned them all and wouldn't let anyone else use them. That was a "monopoly" so there was an argument for breaking it up so that everyone could use the lines. In the case of iMessage (and others), the creators are deliberately building out many different incompatible "lines", and not letting anyone else use those lines. And now people are coming along and saying because it's not a "monopoly", we can't do anything about that. But the real goal was the same in both cases - making universal communication possible. That's what we're all frustrated about here, and the fact that there are dozens of apps trying to wall off competitors is part of the cause of that. Apple is a target because iMessage is the largest such "private line" in the United States.
- viraptor 3y ago> It's desirable for there to be only one system What gets a bit lost in the conversation for iMessage is that the protocol/infra and implementation get merged into one. This is approached in many countries for telcos by splitting the companies providing the lines from the companies providing service on top of them. It's not perfect, but it's better than previous approaches.
- CivBase 3y agoRight. This is much more similar to MS and Internet Explorer back in 98. Interestingly enough, one of the outcomes of that case was IE for the Mac.
- ldarby 3y ago>. Nothing stops you from using another phone, Do you realise phones cost money and not everyone can afford an iPhone?
- alwayslikethis 3y agoBecause Apple has enough cash to pay off enough congressmen.
- albert180 3y agoI guess the EU will be closely watching with Digital Services Act
- sbuk 3y agoWhy, when use of iMessage is a rounding error across the European Union, will the EU rule that Apple are a messaging Gatekeeper? The noises coming from the investagtiong body seem to indicate that they will not treat iMessage as such.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoUnfortunately, the EU isn't going to save us with this one. iMessage usage is minimal in the EU because so many people use alternate messaging services, and the EU already ruled that iMessage won't be forced open because it isn't widely used by business users. In the US, iMessage market share is much higher because back in the aughts we didn't have the sky high SMS rates which forced so many users to other messaging services in other countries.
- JoshuaRogers 3y agoI would suggest that as often as not, when the EU intervenes in technological affairs the result isn’t that things get massively better but rather that people are forced to deal with corporations finding ways to maliciously comply with the letter of the law.
- shiroiuma 3y agoExactly: here outside the US, absolutely no one uses SMS, so no one cares about this issue at all. It's like arguing over the rights to videotape standards. So to me it's somewhat amusing reading these arguments here.
- nicce 3y agoBeeper is commercial app, and because of that it classifies as ”unfair”, unpermitted use of Apple’s private services. They are making supporting argument for Apple, unfortunately, if any regulation happens.
- function_seven 3y agoBecause Ma Bell was a regulated monopoly, and iMessage is not a monopoly. People routinely use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, SMS, FB Messenger, etc. Don't get me wrong, I love that these guys are poking the bear. I wish Apple would do something to let me send high-quality photos and videos to my Android-owning friends via "text". But I don't think the government has a place to force that issue. Plenty of alternatives exist.
- theturtletalks 3y agoWhat’s stopping an open source beeper alternative where users host their own notification server? The rest is client-side anyways.
- solardev 3y agoNetwork effect? The whole value of it is that it lets you use existing networks (iMessage and SMS). Otherwise people could just switch to WhatsApp or any of twenty Google messaging services.
- theturtletalks 3y agoNo I mean a beeper alternative that uses the iMessage backend. The tricky part with beeper is that they have their own notification server that gets the notifications from Apple and turns them into what android understands. That should be self-hosted by each person because it would contain the FairPlay key.
- derefr 3y agoIt’s a trivial cost that people don’t want to pay. Sadly it can’t be run as some kind of ala-carte computation that can scale-to-zero like a Lambda function can, because it needs to be an active connection-oriented daemon that keeps per-connection state — i.e. something that always maintains at least one real OS thread, holding open real OS sockets, on the same machine (so that those sockets don’t break at the TCP level.) In other words, for an individual to deploy their own push daemon, it would necessarily need to live on a $5/mo VPS or something. And people don’t value iMessage at $5/mo. (…which naturally leads to the question: why is there no Lambda-like serverless compute substrate that allows your function to speak a connection-oriented protocol, by externalizing the connection-hold-open and per-connection book-keeping state into the routing layer, such that your own function in the system could scale-to-zero? Exactly like Pusher did for websockets 15 years ago, but routing to a vertically-integrated serverless compute layer rather than a “passive” PHP/CGI-ish REST backend. Seems like an obvious extension for Cloudflare Workers…)
- lm411 3y agoIt's not the equivalent. If the third party phones allowed users access to Ma Bell's network, switching systems, etc, without paying Ma Bell - then it might be equivalent. I'm pretty sure that would be considered theft of communication services.
- sottol 3y agoI feel that's not right either. Apple did not physically build the phone network and nobody is piggybacking on their network, Apple isn't hosting anyone's photos or videos afaict and the user pays for bandwidth, they maybe pay for notification relay to their own users. It's more like phone manufacturer X that accesses Ma Bell's network creates phone with slightly better call quality that only works with other X phones and is worse with anyone else's phones. And they start doing that once they have >50% market share.
- jonhohle 3y agoWhat type of infrastructure and operations do you think is necessary to handle 8.4B messages per day. So far, the cost of those systems and teams has come from hardware sales. The benefit is that it is effectively a paid for service and doesn't need external support from advertisers or by selling user data.
- Miner49er 3y agoA couple hundred servers, and like 5 engineers.
- jonhohle 3y agoMinimally that’s a few million dollars per year for KTLO. At least a few million more for ongoing development. Why should it be free for everyone?
- freedomben 3y agoIt really depends on what stack you pick and what kind of engineers you have. What's App famously used Erlang (an excellent choice for this) and was able to scale to astronomical levels with a fairly small engineering team and hundreds of instances.
- jmye 3y agoWhy are y’all so intent on using iMessage? I (honestly) don’t understand the serious passion behind forcing Apple to open it to everyone. SMS still gets through, and other apps still work. It seems weird to focus so much on this and not on just using something that fits your use case, but maybe I’m missing something.
- shrimpx 3y agoIt's because SMS is unencrypted, and this is an effort to have secure communication between iOS users and Android users (since iMessage is Apple-device-only). There's also a status factor, where Android users are lowly "green bubbles" in iMessage, which signals decreased security and questionable support for the interactions available to iMessage users. Of course everyone can switch to Signal and this is a moot point, but millions of Apple users use iMessage and aren't likely to switch.
- grok25 3y ago> Of course everyone can switch to Signal and this is a moot point, but millions of Apple users use iMessage and aren't likely to switch. Doesn’t this mean that most people simply don’t care?
- shrimpx 3y agoOn the iOS side people don't care, but apparently on the Android side they do?
- jmye 3y agoHow many people really care about encrypted text messages? Most of the time, I’m sending my girlfriend pictures of our dogs. If I cared about encryption, we’d download something else (or use gchat or whatever). This just doesn’t seem like it should be that big a deal.
- shrimpx 3y agoYeah it seems like it's more about "blue bubble" status than it is about encryption.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lm411 3y ago> ... nobody is piggybacking on their network. I would suggest that is exactly what Beeper is doing. Not the end users ISP / WAN connection obviously, but certainly Apple's iMessage infrastructure (servers, switches, bandwidth, etc). iMessage is not a simple P2P platform.