IE was a problem because Microsoft had monopoly marketshare (95% of PC sales included Windows back then). Apple does not have a monopoly. iPhones aren’t even half of all phone sales.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/us-smartphone-...
That market share is certainly enough to warrant FTC regulation. The FTC investigates anticompetitive activity even when the perpetrator is not a monopoly.
While Microsoft had a higher market share, Windows never prevented users from installing a third-party web browser. On the other hand, Apple is actively blocking third-party SMS/MMS clients from iOS via its App Store restrictions. This factor makes it more likely that Apple will be regulated despite iOS currently having a lower market share than Windows during Microsoft's antitrust trial.
The issue here is the iMessage service. Throughout this thread, I have not seen anyone give a single example from US history (monopoly or otherwise) where a company has been forced to provide free access to a service -- at their own expense -- to the customers of their competitors. It's unprecedented!
It's just like airport VIP lounges. Should an airline that offers free VIP lounge access for their business and first class ticket-holders be forced to allow customers of competitor airlines to use their VIP lounge for free? After all, you can meet people in a VIP lounge so there are networking effects. Yet it really doesn't seem right that an airline who built and maintains a VIP lounge at their own expense (rental space in an airport is NOT CHEAP) should be forced to give away access to that space for free to competitors' customers.
How is the iMessage case any different?
Edit: I should also add that I bet Apple can produce a TON of data from usage patterns to show that iMessage in no way harms competitive messaging products on iPhones. Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Snapchat, and countless other messaging products are doing just fine on the iPhone, so I doubt the "bundling" argument holds any water. As for how iMessage affects the Android market? Since when is it against the law to add free features/services to your products in order to distinguish them from your competitors' offerings?
Microsoft lost their antitrust case over IE because they harmed Netscape's browser business on Windows. Bundling IE with Windows had no affect on the Mac/Linux/Unix business and the case was never about that.
Apple's anticompetitive conduct is that it bans third-party SMS/MMS clients as a way to boost usage of its iMessage protocol and disadvantage competing cross-platform messenger services. Microsoft never banned competing web browsers from accessing any protocol (e.g. HTTP or FTP) on Windows, so Apple's conduct in the messaging space is more egregious than Microsoft's previous conduct in the browser space.
As a user I don’t want these other apps getting access to my incoming SMS messages. I’m fine with one app getting all the messages. It really doesn’t make any difference whether my messages have green or blue bubbles (and people complaining about that are really stretching).
As for the argument that 3rd parties should be allowed access to the iMessage network. When are all those other apps coming aboard that plan? When can I write my own app for Messenger instead using Meta’s?
It's common sense that when Apple forbids competitors from implementing a feature that they use for their own product, competitors are harmed. Apple previously made Apple Mail the default email client on iOS with no option to change it. After Apple removed this anticompetitive restriction in iOS 14, competing apps such as Proton Mail and Tuta (which used their own protocols instead of the default IMAP/SMTP protocol to support end-to-end encryption) immediately became more convenient to use on iOS.
The issue with Apple's SMS/MMS client restriction is more severe. Not only am I not able to designate a different messenger as the default SMS/MMS app on iOS, I cannot install one in the first place because Apple has banned them altogether.
Am I the only one who remembers 2006-era Google Talk with federated XMPP? As a user, it was amazing, and I want that level of interoperability back across the board.