1y ago

Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority

www.androidauthority.com Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation

US senators have written to the Department of Justice to investigate Apple's anti-competitive behavior towards Beeper.

US senators have urged the DOJ to probe Apple's alleged anti-competitive conduct against Beeper.

99 comments

I don’t get it. iMessage is Apple’s service. Why are they obliged to open it up for everyone to use? Would it be nice? Yes, of course. Should Apple be legally required to open up access to their service?
- The US Federal Trade Commission puts it this way:
  a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry
  It further explains that "market power" means:
  the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors
  Emphasis added. What the government might argue in this case is that Apple has market power in the online message space because it preloads its own messaging app on its smartphones, which I believe enjoy a majority market share in the USA. One remedy the government could seek is requiring Apple to allow third parties to develop clients for its messaging service.
  
  They aren't excluding competitors. Anyone is free to write a cross platform messaging app that has blue bubbles in it. The preloading thing could be an issue if you can't uninstall imessage. Otherwise it would follow the IE/edge ruling.
  But we'll see what the courts say.
- They didn't, someone made an App to interface with it. Trying to shut that down is anti-competitive.
  
  It's also a huge security hole
  
  Businesses are naturally anticompetitive. It may or may not violate antitrust law. The two main categories are collusion with competitors to prevent new competition, or if they seek to gain or maintain a monopoly via shady methods (just a monopoly itself isn’t illegal though). I doubt if Apple conspired with Google here and it would be a stretch to say they have a monopoly, so it seems like a pointless case to me.
  
  It's not a public API. Hacking someone's private API is already against law - charging $$ for it moreso.
- Yes, they should be legally required to open up access to their service. No more walled gardens that hold a large number of users hostage.
  
  So by this thinking all cars should have compatible parts.
  The world just ain't that way bruh
- You can argue that they're unfairly using monopoly power. Same reason why MS was forced to allow windows to switch browsers.
  
  Monopoly on what?
  
  How would you argue that? There’s plenty of other options and iMessage falls back to MMS, which all phones are capable of.
- I think the problem is that it's unnecessarily hardware locked. They shouldn't have to "open it up" insofar as anyone can access it from whatever app like beeper is doing. But it's only fair that they support other operating systems. They can still control it or even charge a fee to access it from other OSes.
  
  I wish this kind of thing was more spotlighted when Palm and Windows Phone developers were trying to use Google API’s to make apps for their OS’s and got shut down at every turn, eventually killing off the Palm and WP because of device lock-in on apps.
  I still miss what Palm could have been before Google bent them over a barrel with their massively anti-competitive bs.
- When imessage was announced they planned to bring it to other platforms. That died when they realized how much of a lock in it was
- If they're going to default message service to it then yes.
- Because their practices are anti-competitive. School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones because they're "green texters" in iMessage. But most importantly iMessage's connection with SMS causes all interaction to be very low quality images and videos. And when people complain to Tim Apple about the experience, his only response is "Get your grandma an iPhone". Our only saving grace is that the EU is requiring Apple to support RCS, which should solve these issues, except they'll probably find some new way to be anti-competitive about it.
  
  How is creating a proprietary service anti competitive? There are many other methods of messaging and Apple is not stoping anyone from using them.
  Kids being bullied in school has nothing to do with being anti competitive.
  
  School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones
  That’s a people problem, not a market-share problem. From experience, kids will always find something to bully others about — if it’s not the colour of the bubbles, it’s something else: the brand of shoes they wear, the suburb they live in, the sport they play (or don’t play). Bullies will do what they do.
  
  Apple should 100 percent support RCS and Tim's "buy your grandma an iphone" response was stupid and does show that they don't give a shit. However the Beeper situation is something different entirely, if the reports I've read are too be believed it was a security vulnerability or a blatant disregard of apples terms. Also the kids being bullied thing is very overblown, and almost certainly a regional thing. I live in buttfuck no where and I not one kid gives a shit they just want to talk to their friends. My kid has an android and his friend group is like 50/50 on iPhones. Its weird adults and parents who inadvertently say things or give their children the idea that green bubbles are bed. Kids don't give a fuck unless they've learned it somewhere.
  
  Kids don't use imessage, they're on fucking discord

At the root of this issue is that Google never built a messaging service that could survive Google's management shuffle. I understand people want Apple to bend the knee, but this is not their problem. It's perfectly fine for them to intercede Beeper's reverse engineering.
If you're an Android user and you need a messaging app, Signal is 100% open source, secure, and it works on iOS too, so tell your friends!
- And you assume your apple-using friends will listen to you? They are really a part of the problem at least. Google would need to create an app they would want to install by themselves, and this is not exactly easy, if possible at all. Google users are mostly fine with having many apps for communication, apple users are mostly not.
  
  I am fully in the Apple ecosystem, including my phone, work laptop, personal laptop, and an Apple watch. I pretty much exclusively use telegram, and sometimes Discord, not iMessage— and that’s not a niche or unpopular opinion in my experience either. This is absolutely because Google can’t stick with one app or product long enough to gain any market share. Each time they have tried, it’s lasted barely a year or so before they killed it.
  
  I think this is highly dependent on whether you’re still in high school or not. I recently switched to iPhone within the last couple years and everyone I know has an iPhone but almost none of them use iMessage. Facebook messenger, Telegram, Snapchat, hell even IG DMs. It’s all over the place. This sample of people is like 16-60 year olds too, I can’t even find a pattern.
- Apples bundling of iMessage is a barrier to entry. See also the findings of fact for Microsoft vs DoJ during the "browser wars"

More like senators are trying to make another show trial of BS they really have no plans to do anything about, and probably shouldn't be getting in the middle of, to make it seem like they are being productive in some way.
- Answer me yes or no, If I stand in this room and use my phone can I send a message to your phone? — some senator to Tim Apple.
  
  Tim: “No,.. because I blocked your number.”

Why would they need to look into Apple's conduct here? Investigate Beeper for CFAA violations since they cracked into Apple's internal APIs and ignored large chunks of their ToS in the process.
Of course Apple is going to shut down unauthorized access to their messaging system. They'd lose all customer trust instantly if they didn't.
- Reverse engineering for interoperability is legal, is it not? This is interoperability.
  
  Australian legal case on Reverse engineering.
  https://www.dundaslawyers.com.au/reverse-engineering-of-software-what-are-the-legal-boundaries/
- ToS have almost universally been shown to be unenforceable in court. I'm also not sure what the hell you mean by customers would lose trust. It's not as if they had access to information they shouldn't, all they did was reverse engineer the protocol. They still had to have an account and a login and they still only had access to the data that account should have. There's nothing to lose trust over the only thing beeper was doing was emulating being an iMessage client

Man... Some of the Apple fans in this thread are making me lose faith in humanity. They have no idea how technology works, but they are defending an objectively shitty behavior from the world's most wealthy corporation based on... I don't know... their feelings?

I wonder if this case affects the tug of war Apple has with the EU about opening gatekeeping services up. I wonder if it occurs to some power that be that they might use this case (no matter how stupid it is) to argue Apple is a gatekeeper and has to open up iMessage at some point.
Likely won't happen though since it's not an EU problem really. The thing that's more possible is that California or some other progressive-ish US state follows the EU's lead in busting monopolies as they did with the GDPR, and does something about this in two decades.

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