Sigh. It was to be expected that regulation intended to shield users from big tech harm is twisted to instead have one giant attack another.
I get so much SMS and email spam. I get so little iMessage spam. If getting green texts from Android users is the price I have to pay, so be it.
Of course they won't, because there won't be feature parity. The point of SMSes remaining green even though that they are largely without cost is because it signals to the user that iMessage's/Facetime's features aren't available.
Google who argued that apple's designs aren't worthy of protection are now arguing that the colour of a freaking text bubble has great importance. Which one is it?
Of the new proposed changes, I can see so few actually rendering any net benefit to the consumer and EU businesses. There is so much wishful thinking going on here.
Do EU lawmakers believe that these changes will let EU tech businesses shoehorn themselves into these large, difficult to compete against platforms? It is not clear that it'll just be a land rush lead by large american tech companies. Then for any EU companies that do find a niche, they will simply be bought out - just like how the EU's AI darlings were.
It's like they have been baited into this maliciously: why wouldn't the EU introduce changes in a controlled roll out, where they can manage unintended consequences and limit the political fallout for problems that arise. Doing all of this at once is insanely risk-filled, and I feel this will put the journey to consumer protections on the back foot. A politician is not going to have the appetite to delve into this if it turns into toxic soup, meanwhile other countries progress will stall as they gesture warningly at the EU's mistakes.
Network effects also aren’t really all that bad. Would you want 15 apps that you have to rotate through to communicate to different people with, all with different features and capabilities? Probably not. You’d build some protocol on top to make that easier. But then someone says hey you need to open up your protocol and support my protocol and on and on we go.
The crux of this story and most similar stories is that Apple went and made the best product and it’s so good that others can’t compete with it. If the opposite were true we’d just have people battling it out like we used to with video game consoles. Instead we have gigantic multi-hundred billion $ companies attacking Apple’s products and services with big government tools.
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
There is nothing stopping anyone from using open protocols or different messaging apps today.
What’s so frustrating about Google’s attempt to leverage lobbyists to handicap Apple is that customers did coalesce around an app: iMessage, and all of this talk about “open protocols” is just marketing. The protocols you want to use are already here and already open!
“Open” is a nice idea but doesn’t work in practice here which is why no matter what we have many chat apps and poor cross-compatibility because companies building these apps don’t want it. And again, we already have these and they are clearly inferior.
..for the purposes of invading user privacy no less.
Can't have iMessage out there free from Google Ads can we? And we certainly wouldn't want all those iMessage users to not have the pleasure of having their data sold to info brokers? That's a human right isn't it? /s
These tech firms are just wayy too powerful. It's like if you take one down, the others say, "Awesome!!!", and they start selling the data that we've now legally obliged the first tech firm to give them access to.
Today, if an iPhone user sends a message to an Android user, that message is sent via SMS. If Google wanted, it could already scrape the message. What would change if the protocol was open and the message was sent to the Android device using iMessage?
There is no expectation for Apple to give Google read/write access to the iMessage database (not that it exists, but still). What is the downside of users being able to interoperate and use the protocol?