> “Through iMessage, business users are only able to send enriched messages to iOS users and must rely on traditional SMS for all the other end users,” the letter, which was sent to internal market commissioner Thierry Breton, reportedly reads. iMessage is an important gateway between businesses and their customers, and this is “without doubt justification for Apple’s designation as gatekeeper for its iMessage service,” the letter argues.

This is contorted.

Any "business user" communicating with a broad customer base is using some CRM service because they have not-Apple business customers and customer sales/service wants to reach customers "where they are" while collating conversations in one CRM.

So they use a single tool that lets them talk to many channels:

https://www.freshworks.com/live-chat-software/messaging-chan...

Apple Business Chat is there. Businesses can already talk to Apple iMessage users, along with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, SMS, etc.

From the customer side, it looks like this: https://www.apple.com/ios/business-chat/

PS. Everyone who signed that letter captures, keeps, and uses SMS chat data for advertising / marketing / commercial (money making) law enforcement access / other "legitimate" purposes.