There's such a thing as overregulation, but when industry fails to act in an upstanding manner they are playing chicken with regulators. Here's the result. The way to avoid this is create an industry body to develop a standard and 'regulate' themselves. It looks bad when you do that, then also flaunt the standard for greater profit/market position.

As much as I agree with this in principle, there is absolutely no denying that Apple is abusing their power when it comes to consumer lock-in.

I find it very hard to argue against regulation which is only meant to make devices more interoperable. USB-C for charging is mature enough at this point that it seems reasonable to declare it THE charging port.

An interesting - partially ironic - observation here, is that Apple actually designed the reversible USB-C connector and submitted it to the USB-IF - a team of bureaucrats. Bureaucrats, who of course previously were responsible for blunders such as micro-USB-B 3.0, and more recently, the ambiguous shitshow that is the current state of the USB spec.

I wholeheartedly believe that Apple is such a design-driven company that they would actually engage with regulators again (gasp, even the EU), if they were to come up with a better connector design down the road. Everybody wins.

> but having bureaucrats decide is the worst idea ever

I agree wholeheartedly, but what's the alternative? The so-called "free market" (not that such a thing actually exists) clearly has not solved this problem for us.

It's a problem for you only because you want to use iMessage. iMessage is about as far from a monopoly as you can get.

Who else 'sells' imessage ?

So every app is a monopoly now? This is getting ridiculous.

Signal

Explain how please.

I couldn’t agree more. I like the walled garden. I don’t care if some messages are green. If I wanted to have granular control over everything, I’d buy an Android phone. I really struggle to see why some regulatory body should be able to force a company to alter their products unless it’s something that impacts customer safety. There are plenty of alternatives in the market.

I suspect most iPhone users are of a similar opinion or no opinion at all. Sure, here on HN you can find plenty of strong opinions, but the average iPhone user doesn’t care and is happy with the ecosystem and hardware.