> You have created an artificial distinction that makes iMessage [...] somehow different from every other service Did I? Or did Apple? Apple is the one that b

> You have created an artificial distinction that makes iMessage [...] somehow different from every other service Did I? Or did Apple? Apple is the one that baked support for it into their SMS app. Apple is the party that designed iMessage to solely rely on Apple servers instead of extending to third-party instances or carrier partners. I'm willing to give Apple a fair shake here, but their approach is undeniably predatory. They are an enormous portion of the first-world smartphone market, and their ivory tower approach to communications is historically untenable. Personally speaking, I despise RCS as a protocol but at least it acknowledged third-party interop as a necessary component of... you know, agnostic communication infrastructure. You'd hope that a company like Apple would annihilate Google in this arena, but instead they're silent. The largest company in the world, which built it's entire business on revolutionizing the phone, has nothing to give back to public communication infrastructure. They won't even come to the discussion table for future protocols unless regulators threaten them. Apple's entire modern business is built on making artificial distinctions between themselves and their competitors. That's why the DMA exists; Apple doesn't have the right to access a market where they deny their competitors fair competition. They don't have to forfeit every advantage they have, just the ones deemed anticompetitive. Since Apple has refused to negotiate on this in the past, it stands to reason that government intervention it the only way to make consumers lives (on both sides of the walled garden) better.