This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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 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
How? It's not a MitM or anything like that, it's connecting exactly how an Apple device would connect. Everything is still E2EE, just one of the ends can now be an Android device.
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.
Ah, common misconception - hacking an API != creating a compatible program. ( reverse engineering)
Imagine a drill company has a special shape for its bits. Our law allows someone else to either.. make bits that can fit in that shape OR make their own drill that can accept those bits.
"BUT they copied!" - it doesn't have to be a copy to be compatible, and they don't even have to use the 'special shape' just be able to work with the special shape. The law does not allow for protections around that. Doing so would be by definition anti-competitive. Our anti competition laws or rather our IP protection laws are not intended in any way to 'ensure a monopoly'. The IP laws give a person a right to either keep something they do secret OR share that knowledge with the world so we all benefit, in exchange for a very limited monopoly.
Practically speaking, If I got the KFC Colonel to give me the list of 11 herbs and spices in a Poker game, and then started making my own delicious poultry that is totally cool. Likewise, If I figured out that all that was inside a Threadripper was blue smoke and started making my own blue smoke chips, the law is ok with that.
In this case roughly, Having a public facing endpoint. And then saying that the public can access that endpoint is cool Saying that only the public using the code I alone gave them -- well... that's not been litigated a lot, but all signs point to no.
It's like Bing saying its for Safari only, and suing people who accessed it using Chrome. It is a logical claim, but the law does not provide that kind of protection/enforcement.
tl;dr these concepts are old but being newly applied to fancy technology. The laws in place are clear in most cases. A car maker can not dictate what you put in the tank. FedEX and UPS can't charge you differently for shipping fiction books or medical journals or self published stories. And they'd probably get anti-trust scrutiny they even told you what brand/style of boxes you had to use.
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.
You can argue that they're unfairly using monopoly power. Same reason why MS was forced to allow windows to switch browsers.
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.
Palm terrified them.
Palm apps were tiny, took trivial resources, and could provide a lot of what was done with new apps on Android. Dictionaries, calculators, games (I played monopoly on a Treo, it looked great). I watched Mp4 movies on a Treo.
Imagine Android with a Palm Subsystem so all those old Palm apps could run. It would've majorly slowed Android app adoption, perhaps even giving enough support to allow PalmOS architecture to develop into a competitor to Android.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
