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Comment by iSnow | Hacker News Reader

If you are starting to corner the market and are able to use your leverage to block competitors in a way that threatens to undermine their business, then the EU (and to an extend the USA) will regulate you.

I can flip your question around and ask "should you have the right to play dirty?". Which is what Apple has been doing, there's exactly zero good reason to not license out access to the protocol.

I don't own Apple, I am a consumer. If this leads to me not having to install 5 different chat clients, I am grateful. It was the exact same with all the proprietary charging plugs for smartphones.

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What market have they cornered? They're not even the number one messaging app on the continent that's imposing this rule.

> there's exactly zero good reason to not license out access to the protocol.

There's at least three good reasons:

* Keeping the protocol private is a competitive advantage * Licensing a protocol and managing those licensees is not free * A shared protocol dramatically decreases Apple's ability to innovate on top of that protocol

I would argue that it'd be worth while to ignore these issues if Apple was hampering competition in the messaging space, but I just don't see it. I can easily use any messaging app I want on my phone, the only thing stopping me is that iMessage is good enough.

Apple has APIs for iMessage: https://register.apple.com/messages

You can even build a REST endpoint for Apple to invoke when your business receives a message from a user: https://register.apple.com/resources/messages/msp-rest-api/m...

Where's the playing dirty and undermining businesses part?

Wait, there must be more to it. If this is open to the competition to build on, what exactly is the EU forcing Apple to open up?

I'm too lazy to research why exactly Microsoft can't use this API to interface with iMessage and instead opting for a half-baked bluetooth solution, but there must be some hurdle.

> "should you have the right to play dirty?"

is Apple playing dirty in this scenario? and if it is, then what exactly is stopping regulators from improving SMS thus making Apple's position moot?

Regulators can't improve SMS, they aren't tech companies or telcos.

of course they can. just like they can force tech companies to share their internet based messaging systems.

Barely anyone has an iPhone, it’s not even remotely close to a monopoly.

I would like a practical way to have a single chat app on all my devices, some of which Apple makes.

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