Feels like a uniquely american take. Companies that are maliciously compliant are not the norm.
Leaving behind that most is an ambiguous enough term that means you could basically discredit anything I come up with, how do you feel about regulations that limit the use of harmful or toxic chemicals?
What about regulations that disallow predatory gambling, or the sale of products that do not meet their claims?
Regulations are the only tool that society has to prevent companies acting against the social good.
If you think the regulations are bad then you should genuinely consider sending updated versions to your representatives.
Apple is the last real holdout here, keeping SMS and MMS alive.
> [...] want to implement something "different" [...]
The slippery-slope argument we're seeing here is that eventually, regulations would require all products and services to be exactly the same for inter-compatibility, which in turn induces a cooling effect on any innovation or novel developments (at least for existing product verticals under regulatory capture).
Setting a baseline for interoperability is not the same as requiring them all to be the same.
With infinite amounts of other free apps, why are regulations necessary? Let people decide for themselves.
Should we take the same approach with clean air and see what happens?
On how messaging works on thousand-dollar phones? Yes.
If your were in charge when the telephone network was designed, poor people would not even be able to make a phonecall to their middleclass neighbour or senator, they'd have to buy a special Rich People phone
The lawlessness described here isn't harm on a third party against their consent. It's fully known by both parties at the time of the voluntary transaction.
That's pretty funny considering the European Commission's original complaint against Apple was for anti-competitive behavior.
Maybe things would have turned out differently if Apple hadn't embraced, extended and extinguished SMS. Maybe regulators would be a little more lenient if the App Store was ruled with anything other than an iron fist. But now they have to take action, not because Apple is unique, but because their business practices are interfering with the progress of the rest of the industry. Competitive agency is a weak excuse when they're a noted tyrant on their own platform.
It is, in actuality, anti-competitive as there is no way to a competitor to participate other than creating a separate platform or App for messaging. Because iMessage comes with and is supported by both all iPhones and Apple it is an uneven playing field; it is impossible to compete & is therefore anti-competitive.
The same thing would happen with TMSC, at the moment Apple buys out a large chunk if not all of their production capacity for a node - this is fine, it's just business. If Apple said to TMSC, "we'll buy out all your capacity for this node but only if you contractually refuse to sell this node to any other company while we're using it" this is anti-competitive behaviour.
They would call this a win.
Not arguing against your comment. Just adding a viewpoint that some have. I.e Big government should spend more time on these kind of things instead of “life saving” things.
Google would probably love it if Android shipped with a Google-branded, end-to-end encrypted messaging app that people liked to use.
I think that there is a combination of internal Google problems and problems in Google’s relationships with Android vendors that makes this difficult. And then, any such app would be probably be in, what, 6th place at this point? Meanwhile, Meta has apps #1 and #2.
I would argue that the evidence over the past several years has shown that the default position w.r.t. to Google's motivations should not default to 'benign' under any circumstance. With all other things being equal, and without evidence to the contrary, it makes sense to operate under the assumption that Google will enthusiastically and universally do everything they can to violate your privacy in any manner available to them, no matter how subtle.
“Not benign” and “not malicious” can both be true. Google is motivated by self-interest, is staffed by engineers which have various conflicting self-interest and ideologies, and has a culture with various competencies and dysfunctions. Sometimes Google will do things that benefit consumers and sometimes Google will do things that harm consumers, but it’s not out of altruism nor is it out of malice.
Same as other large companies.
How do you explain all these damn GDPR pop ups on every site that make it as difficult as possible to disagree?
New regulations were drafted that required these popups to be as easy to agree as to disagree, precisely because of this.
Right now, too many end users get fatigue fooled into blaming the EU rather than the companies tracking them, whereas on mobile they are aware that it's Facebook triggering the dialog, not the EU: just see how many users end up refusing Facebook tracking when they have a clear choice that doesn't push them one way or the other.
It would even help companies who currently delegate handling GDRP to thirdparty services that prey on small companies worried about being non-compliant.
So for me, that reads as anytime I am asked about consent, it is an admission that the site is using my data/adding cookies in a way that is unnecessary and invasive. Automatically decline!
I'm working at removing google analytics from my product site specifically because it means I don't need a cookie consent popup any longer, despite supporting log in (which will set an actually essential, non-third-party cookie).
The fallacy here is that you don't get to decide what "social good" is, especially in this case. People get to choose what is good for them, we're talking about tech products here. I see regulations in this specific case as something that goes against progress, whatever that means for the company of your favorite messaging app for the reasons I've explained above.
What about startups that will have to think about this one more thing and maybe put in twice the work when they want to validate their new product?
We're probably leaving out about thousands of other cases here, that's why I made the argument that it sounds nice but it's actually making things worse from my point of view.
Well, technically I have a say, I elect my leaders and can write to them with my opinion. Often it is the case that salesmen and charletons get into those positions but the basic premise of those positions is that they're intended to act in the social good. What you propose is that somehow tech companies will act in the social good by themselves, which I find particularly dubious.
All capitalist companies (and by that I mean, any company that is enjoying success in a capitalist society) have an often unstated goal of monopolising their market.
It is a natural outcome of competition that eventually there is a victor. The whole premise of capitalism is that competition is good, but eventually the strongest will win and you have a monopolistic leader.
The only antidote to this is regulations.
Making the argument that regulation hurts smaller companies is also something uniquely American. This regulation (and many other tech regulations) are really aimed at people abusing their position today, not some theoretical startup that somehow captures 60% of a market overnight.
FWIW, I actually really like iMessage and agree with the decision Apple made not to open it, but I can't abide talk like this because a lot of people seem to think that regulation is somehow anti-capitalist, when in reality regulation is the only thing that could keep the capitalist machine running once there is a monopoly position or a sufficient moat around a service.
Well, I respectfully disagree, I'm a firm believer that regulations disproportionately hurt smaller businesses in the long run because those giants that have the monopoly move way faster than governments and they usually have thousands of smart lawyers ready to find holes and exploit/get around regulations made, usually, by people that does not understand the subject enough.
Want to take a guess and see who does not have thousands of smart lawyers?
Just FYI: We have the Apple example with USB-C ready to showcase this exact thing
I have so far had good experiences with the legal system and regulations by choosing industries that are not unethical.
Nobody is chasing people who are not in violation of the cardinal rule zero: "Do not act in a way that requires [me] to make a new rule"
Yeah you made the point very clear already in all your other posts, no need to repeat it everywhere. Other point errors in your arguments like this being for 75b corps completely nullifying your core arguments, lets just say most of the forum including me, EU and indeed world doesn't share your view at all.
In fact, some healthy dose of regulations makes society actual modern society, less people dying and suffering because money-first. Speed of progress at any costs, believe it or not, is not the ultimate measure of how 'good', moral or developed society is, despite very very few getting richer quicker that way.
I don't know if that's what it means in the EU, but operationally it's observably what it means in the USA. I will say from a distance it looks like the EU's unelected bureaucrats have eve more power than the American ones do.
The EU's civil servants are, by and large, an exceptionally talented bunch of people, most of whom are multilingual in addition to being experts in the fields they were hired for.
As for their having power, it's subject to democratic constraint. Maybe you should inform yourself about the process by which EU regulations are made? (No, it isn't perfect; you could start with the Trilogue Process).
We'll regulate as we see fit in the EU. Businesses that don't like it are welcome and free to go do business elsewhere.
I predict that if the US foreign policy elite deems it desirable that Google operate in Europe, then Google will operate in Europe. The US based empire is happy to let the EU regulate cheese and wine, but when it comes to geopolitics they keep them on a tight leash. The Ukraine affair has shown that beyond all doubt. Hats off to the French though for rejecting permanent occupying forces under De Gaulle and never letting them back.
It's nice to pretend that GDPR somehow struck a blow against corporate overreach, but in reality it was permitted because it didn't degrade the value of Big Tech for the Intelligence Community.
You have proposed no mehcanism to keep monopolies in check. You are a firm beliver in what?
> giants that have the monopoly move way faster than governments
So governments should be even more agressive and disproportionate to be effevtive? That is the inevitable conclusion of your argument.
Seriously? There was no regulation on search, so how did google become a monopoly?
I think USB-C's relatively flimsily implemented open standard is kind of evidence of why Apple is hesitant to things like RCS. Good luck charging a Nintendo Switch or your laptop with just a random usb-c cable you found laying around that came with who knows what. Hope you have an entire day day.
That's ridiculous. There's plenty of companies that want to do what they do well and make a good profit, but have no interest in being the only player in their market.
I wish people being even that principled... I think the reactionaries in this debate are just the current generation of Apple "fanbois" who, for whatever reason, feel some need to "protect" a trillion-dollar company, or just good ol' fashioned elitism?
My pet theory is that the frothy bile in posts wanting to keep iMessage private is probably grounded in psychology/sociology: People with a quite genuine fondness for Apple's products and services, combined with their higher barriers to entry (monetary cost), forms the basis for their in-group identity, and they don't want an out-group seen as inferior (Android users, etc) from getting to join-in their, private, shared-experience. It's the same as with kids fighting over PlayStation vs Xbox.
Heh, it reminds me of when I was like that: I was a very visibly-on-the-spectrum kid who knew Photoshop, before anyone else at my school even knew what it was; when MSN Messenger 6.0 came out with support for custom user avatars/profile-pics: I thought this would lead to "normal" people learning Photoshop/digital-art and airbrushing and all getting their own Wacom tablets to make their own avatar-art and I'd lose my... special status as that one weird kid who knows Photoshop. Nah, turns out in the end everyone at school just used photos of themselves or the logos of rock bands (Radiohead's was popular) or sportswear brands. And in 2023, most people still don't know Photoshop.
So being an Apple user tends to makes someone protective of whatever they feel makes Apple... Apple. Fortunately those people aren't MEPs who get to vote on legislation with a demonstrable public benefit.
Again, there's no clear-cut answer at any given time whether or not "this particular possibly-restrictive regulation is good for everyone." Sometimes it is, sometimes it ain't. That's what you use democracy/government for, to figure these things out.
How do negative externalities and imperfect information figure into that? Sure, I'd love to buy Monsanto's awesome defoliant because it's cheaper than BASF's equivalent, but I may also get cancer from it in 5 years, or I may be killing pollinating insects for many miles downwind and downstream.
Do you suppose market forces could have gotten rid of lead in paint or gasoline if regulations hadn't?
Due to network effects of communication tools, this is not really true.
It is definitely a hard thing to overcome but not impossible. Especially as people become more privacy focused. I, for example, have had zero luck moving my family to Signal, and I'm the only non iPhone in the family network with my grapheneos phone and receive constant complaints about how I mess up group threads.
Yes. Consider how cars have become incredibly safe over the years. Is this because the government writes good regulations? No. It is because IIHS (and the government, as well) do crash tests and publish the results. Consumers gravitate towards cars that have top safety ratings.
Ironically, the government is why leaded gasoline still exists at all.
It is a much better method of concensus than regulation when no involuntary third party harm exists. It ensures those that have a stake are able to vote, where the size of your vote is proportional to the resources dedicated. Of course not everyone has equal voting power. Why should they when it comes to privately consumed goods and services?
As an iPhone, iPad, and iMessage user, please explain how I will "suffer horribly" from being able to interact with the iMessage service from non-Apple devices.
If anyone can do iMessage on any device, it is logical that these protections may weaken over time.
At worst you could be flooded with invites but that wouldn't be much different than any one of our linkedin accounts and there could be easy mechanism to ban external servers that are reported to allow too many spammers.
2) Apple may choose not to try to implement new features that they otherwise would have, for several possible reasons: similar to #1, they don't think they can feasibly implement them cross-platform; due to the extra effort of supporting multiple platforms, they no longer have the dev resources to devote to it; they think it will no longer be as profitable; etc
Apple obviously won't write these apps, or support those apps or the devices they run on.
Also, If Apple at a later date add features to the iMessage protocol then they document the changes & make this available and are clearly not responsible to implement or support these changes on platforms other than their own.
Apple is not being forced to do anything at all here, except stop blocking other vendors from using iMessage.
> All apple have to do is release documentation on the iMessage protocol, and allow other vendors to use this protocol to build apps that can use apple's iMessage service.
Your very argument is contradictory. The law does require Apple to do something. It requires them to reveal trade secrets and IP.
Do you know the specific requirements of the law, and that this would be within their terms? Because, as I stated fairly clearly, I do not know what the law requires, and was working based on one possible (fairly strict) version of what it could be.
If the law just says Apple has to open the protocol, then that certainly reduces the potential problems—but, as hellojesus points out, there may be aspects of the service that Apple is unwilling to give away because they involve trade secrets. Now, you and I may not particularly care whether Apple is able to protect every single one of its trade secrets, but I guarantee you they do, and unless the law is worded such that it requires them to give those away (again: Do you know the wording of the law? If so, please share and enlighten us!), I think that there's a very good chance that they will choose to remove functionality from iMessage rather than do so.
To be quite clear, on the whole, I think that opening up iMessage will be for the best, even being an Apple and iMessage user myself. I was simply responding to a post that was asking for potential ways in which existing iMessage users could suffer because of it.
It's a chat app. It's one of the first apps a programmer learns to make.
The one and only thing separating iMessage from 10,000 other chat apps is the fact it's the default on the most common phone.
The trade secret is inertia and anti competitive lock-in.
No, the biggest fans of “free markets” do not think that, in fact, they mock both the general idea of “market failure” and the specific places where people outside their faith identify such failures:
https://mises.org/library/market-failure
https://mises.org/library/market-failure-myth
https://mises.org/library/myth-market-failure
Central banking does not exist in a free market. Of course it will fail. Free markets are designed precisely to avoid the inevitable failure of a central authority.
You may have clicked on it, but I don’t see how you got that message from it. It argues that free markets are good, and that problems attributed to “market failure” are instead failures of other things (like central banking) that are not features of free markets. (All of the other pieces argue variations on the same thing; its plays a central role in the Mises Institute’s economic dogma.)
Ah, so you have never heard of market failure, market manipulation, cartels, negative externalities, qash trading, self dealing, insider trading, wage supression agreements, and dozens of others?
You do realise that without government to keep fraud and manipulation in check 'free market' collapses into anarchy in one week?
Can you provide an example of this? Or maybe point out some theory/philosophy that builds to this? I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm legitimately curious what is out there as this doesn't seem like a self-evident claim.
He or she doesn’t get to, but the society does. Collectively. Not individually. That’s the premise that makes the difference between “society” and a “collection of individuals”
People have decided, by voting.
Why do you think voting with your wallet is the only legitimate way of expressing your wishes? What if someone is poor, they get no vote?
Maybe tbe poor person needs access to technology to not be poor, and the markets have locked them out?
> What about startups
The laws that apply to monopolies / oligopolies dont apply to startups
Flourish is a generous term.. There are countless examples of companies in all industries who will take full advantage of no regulations in the pursuit of profits solely.
And only when it's too late and they have caused so much chaos for people will they lobby for their own "symbolic" regulations.
There is a happy medium in there somewhere, but the US model is not it.
Mojang and Skype come to mind. As well as three of my former companies that are now owned by Oracle.
The EU market is definitely harder, it is not as contiguous and large as the US one, even the smallest required task: localisation, is hugely expensive.
So you can hit a critical scale faster in the US, sure, but any time anyone actually conquers Europe all that awaits them is acquisition.
Also, anecdotally, SMS was invented in europe so no need to regulate something already open and european.
Regulations are the best tool for that. But there's always sabotage as a fallback.
Okay, this is where I think we need to make clear who this requirement applies to. If we click through the first link, found in the first sentence in the article, to the actual source text[0] and run it through Google Translate, we can find that this requirement only applies to companies...
>... whose market capitalization reaches at least 75 billion euros or whose annual turnover exceeds 7.5 billion euros. To qualify as gatekeepers, these companies must also provide certain services such as browsers, messaging or social media which have at least 45 million end users per month in the EU and 10,000 business users per year.
[0]https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/fr/press-room/20220315IP...
- Google and Apple must do X => unconstitutional
- All Companies bigger than X with chat-like apps and an app store and a near-oligopoly OS must do X => probably constitutional
- All Companies such that (proceed to list dozen of random characteristics meant to only ever apply to Google and Apple ) must do X => probably unconstitutional
That's still possible. The company owning that platform just has to ensure that its services are accessible by any client. Protocols/APIs can still be further developed or brand new ones introduced. But they still have to be documented & be made accessible.
That's allowed. There's not some new law that all messaging apps must implement the iMessage protocol, or that they must interoperate with iMessage.
They interoperate fine with older iPhones, Macs and iPads that don't have those features.
It also requires that features such as group messaging and audio/video calling.
The job of most government officials is to find plausible solutions to real problems, get a mob engaged and mobilized to solve it, then get the money voted into play so they can extract it via kickbacks and other indirect payments from the contractors.
They're gonna be trying to regulate anything they think is capable of justifying the racket.
Example: Youtube.com 17million dollars running for 18 months, healthcare.gov, 2 billion dollars failed on launch and not used at all.
For a different comparison, why don't we look at Uber: it has market dominance to the point of being a verb, yet it loses more money per year than Healthcare.gov has cost in its entire existence.
Also, worth noting is that dozens of states managed the Obamacare site rollouts just fine as an example of government managing tech projects just fine.
I couldn't care less if Apple is 'owned' or not, its nothing special to me compared to all other corporations. Having at least a bit compatible messengers is definitely something positive, its quite a mental gymnastics to immediately try to come up with some theoretical reasons why this shouldn't happen at all (and failing at that). If apple didn't do typical apple thing to create its own standards and share it with nobody, they wouldn't be hammered by regulators 15 years down the line (lightning port, now this, we will see what comes next, plenty of topics to pick up).
Apple knew very well this will eventually come, same for USB, but they made it into operational cost of having some sort of advantage to get more income till its stopped. Now correction happens. You regulate such thing because clearly corporations only care about profits. And markets, as wonderful as they are, always put money on the first place so waiting for them to move corps into more considering-society territory is often a fruitless effort unless you have gigatons of patience.
Issue is ChatGPT is too politically biased for many discussions unfortunately.
Seriously, there's no serious argument that suggests that this is the likelihood. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes it doesn't. The problem is, no one notices the good stuff due to regulation because you're just used to it.
Frankly, it's getting irritating that people aren't understanding this more?
You have spent many years of schooling learning to count. Have you studied economics for at least 1 year of formal education? Have you read a book by a real economist?
Read 'Economics, the user's guide'. This is not how they think, this is not how they argue.
What we have here, is a person who hasnt learnt math arguing that 3 + 3 = 7 and claiming it's logically obvious.
Or like a medieval scientist arguing that Spontaneous Generation (Mice spawn in straw by themselves) is a law of physics and it's logically obvious.
I have an undergrad degree in economics from Harvard University. Gotta say it makes me pretty well equipped to poke at how BS it often is.
Economists are often the worst, because almost everything involves money, so you can just pretend that every problem is an economics problem.
Yes all those regulations that actually make things worse.
Which ones are those again? specifically?
I find that generally people who make hand-wavey boogeyman 'regulation is bad' arguments typically struggle to identify which regulations are bad and why, and conveniently forget about the thousands of regulations that make their life livable every day.
Companies who decided to continue their invasive policies chose to implement those popups to provide legal cover. Non-invasive companies don't need to do that. The issue is with the companies, not the regulation.
But you didn't respond to the regulations thing.
At the very least I get the option to not be tracked on those shitty websites, but I would really, really have preferred if they didn't make me go through all those intentionally confusing and probably illegal steps to opt out of tracking.
The law didn't force pop-ups anywhere. Some companies chose to put pop-ups on their websites.
The laws don't stop it. They just force it to change shape. It can be stopped by careful consumption.
I’m trying to figure out in what way this has made anything better, safer, or whatever? By the way, cookies is like the 1996 way of tracking and those opt outs don’t opt you out of tracking.
So, yeah. Super giant win for regulations there - clicking away useless disclaimers en masse to satisfy some EU bureaucrats poor understanding of technology. I’m sure they got a great post out of it. It’s like the pop up ad that you are required to pop up on every website but no one benefits, not even the website owner. At least a real ad the website owner makes some money.
The GDPR doesn't forbid using cookies, by the way. If cookies are used to remember that you logged in using a session cookie, or remember the state of a shopping cart, or stuff like that, no warning is necessary. It's a law which requires consent to tracking, not consent to cookies.
You complain about lawmakers' poor understanding of technology, but I don't think your understanding of law is any better if you think that "every website is forced to show a pop-up". They choose to show a pop-up because they're forced to get consent if they want to track you.
Fact is most popups inform you about cookie use but don’t give you an option to do jack. And what makes you believe they’re ePrivacy compliant? I’ll bet you 90% of those sites, even when well intentioned, pollute you with tracking cookies anyways.
I meant GDPR. It's the reason why websites have to get consent if they want to track you. I believe you're right that it doesn't mention cookies though, I don't believe it cares about what technology is used for tracking.
> Edit: by the way no modern website uses cookies to maintain your shopping cart, and instead of relying on a persistent credential cookie
That's what I meant. You store some unique ID on the client in a cookie, then you have a shopping cart database on the back-end. I didn't mean to imply that the cart items are stored in the cookie, just to distinguish the persistent shopping cart use-case from the logging in to a user account use-case.
> you could just use a password manager to expedite login and be more secure overall.
I do this. I still want to be logged in for a while.
> Finally, “private” mode on most browsers contains cookies to short lived session cookies within the tab lifespan.
I know. Would you find it very convenient if your browser always acted as if you were in private mode and didn't keep you logged in for longer than the lifespan of the tab? No? Neither would I.
Actually, I do use privacy mode at all times. The only hindrance is the need to recredential. I have a password manager that auto fills those forms in. It works great, and is better security overall. My cookies database shouldn’t be equivalent to a password file, and I don’t carry around a pile of spammy cookies handing them out to every invasive spy company, hoping an obnoxious pop up mandated by an ineffective regulation will shield me. I use computer science, which always works, rather than political science, which is just a degree for folks who like to drink too much.
Before the regulation, sites would do whatever they wanted if your browser settings weren't set up perfectly.
The regulation was there to prevent companies from abusing cookies, banner is just a side-effect of companies not willing to respect privacy.
It’s 2023. You don’t need cookies like you did in 1996 to totally shit on everyone’s privacy, by the way.
This again is a talked up hypothetical problem at best. We've had chat for 30y now and while progress has been disruptive in the beginning, things have considerably consolidated.
I don't quite get what's so great about having to install 5 different chat clients just because your social network is too varied to force them onto one.
It's a case of corporate greed where sensible solutions (like licensing out the protocol) are not done to damage the opponent. I don't profit from this - if companies hadn't been this evil, the EU wouldn't have come down on them. If they don't like it, they can just stop selling smartphones in Europe.
Of course you don't see it, the innovation was stifled by the regulation! /s
This is never how it was supposed to be. The internet was the massive success it is because it is built on open standards.
Back in the day, if anyone wanted to build a better protocol at something, you had open discussions and eventually come up with an RFC that anyone and everyone can implement and be interoperable.
While it's difficult to shove that genie back into the bottle, anything that in any way promotes interoperable standards above these terrible proprietary walled gardens is a huge win.
Remember ICQ? The official clients were bloated and generally meh. Many people didn't ever see them, not even once. Almost everyone I knew used QIP, Miranda, Adium, or something else third-party. ICQ the company sometimes broke the protocol and then there was a massive uproar. Then clients got updated and everyone carried on messaging. But the system being involuntarily open like this meant that there were ICQ clients for so many things that wouldn't ever get official treatment otherwise. Basically — if it has a network interface, a screen, a means of text input, and can run arbitrary code, it'd have an ICQ client built for it at some point. There was one in the form of an ELF binary for Siemens phones for example.
No one is asking for a standardized protocol. It is my understanding that what is being asked for here is the documentation of their existing protocol that would allow third-party clients and bridges to be built. And this is an unequivocally good thing.
Signal is actually removing SMS support, so problem solved on that end. But Signal can be installed on most platforms anyway, so if someone wanted to participate in the extra features, they always had the option of simply installing the client app. I can't install iMessage for Android if I want to be in the family group message and not see "Mom liked an image" 15 times. I personally dislike iPhones, but I still want to participate in my family's group chat, Apple doesn't give me that option. At least with WhatsApp, Signal or whatever what phone we have doesn't matter and we don't have to join the walled garden to use really basic features. I don't know what phone my friends in Signal group chats or WhatsApp use, because it doesn't matter.
If you're going to bridge different platforms, allow the other platforms to update to support it. It is exclusionary. Apple does this with FaceTime, I have my family install Duo/Meet on their Apple phones because I have to explain to them I don't have an Apple device for it, or if I do, its my work machine. At least that's a little less hostile than, "you can chat with your family but you're going to see activity you can't participate in".
No, I don't think so. You can set a standard that defines a baseline of features that all interoperable messaging apps must support. But that doesn't preclude apps from offering additional functionality over and above the standard.
Idk though maybe I misunderstood it
Because there's absolutely no downside to telling Apple it can't artificially make its iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices. We literally have seen leaked emails where Apple deliberately does this as an anti-consumer platform lock in play. The slippery slope hypothetical you provide is not the reality. Nobody is asking governments to regulate adding cool new features to the <Open Message Protocol> that participants can choose to implement or not for their users as they see fit. What regulators are saying is that Apple can't deliberately make Sneetches of us and needs to allow interoperability on their human-critical messaging platform. In the US the DMCA actually makes it explicitly legal to reverse engineer a protocol for the purpose of interoperability. This idea basically extends that to "and you can't punish users for building applications that interoperating with it" but of course is framed as "just fucking stop disallowing it greedy asshats".
If I could install a 3rd party SMS app on iPhone (like how Signal used to work on Android) I'd be more skeptical about needing this regulation.
If Apple wasn't doing this artificially and iMessage actually had features that were innovative, and that other people couldn't reasonably be expected to implement in a way that would be a detriment to the protocol, I'd be more skeptical. TBH they've probably spent more resources on preventing interoperability than if they didn't care and let it be open...
It's like you don't believe it's possible with the countless man years of resources these companies have to have software both interoperate and degrade gracefully when one client doesn't support all protocol features. I don't buy it, I believe we can.
You're spreading FUD.
Every instance of that is a huge guesswork mess that I wouldn't wish upon average people to navigate though. RCS has tons of "maybe implement" features, and don't even get me started on the mess that's XMPP. If you ever tried to use OMEMO from two different clients at once, you know what I'm talking about.
If two clients have good implementation, there is nothing messy about user experience. The only problem is that most clients are developed by hobbyists in their spare time, who might have very different ideas on how to do key verification, etc, so you get only what you get. It is not because of the protocol.
No, I don't. OMEMO practically's only benefit is fixing that one usecase.
By the way, iMessage is XMPP. Whatsapp is XMPP. Just artificially closed. Long etc.
I've heard these rumors, but they don't seem to be true. WhatsApp seems to have moved on a long time ago (to a binary format wrapped in an implementation of the noise protocol framework) and I find zero indication iMessage was ever XMPP.
But that's besides the point. XMPP is great for a uniform ecosystem (in fact, a lot of XEPs are some company standardizing their use-case), but awful if you allow federation and third party clients.
Isn't that exactly what you're asking of Apple? Apple already has SMS. You want them to adopt RCS because it has cool new features that are lacking in SMS.
Let's say I propose this rule: Apple must publish the iMessage spec and allow other services to send/receive iMessages.
That doesn't force Apple or anyone else to implement any specific feature, beyond allowing others to send/receive messages. WhatsApp or Signal could decide they don't want to implement the iMessage protocol and they're free to do so. WhatsApp might support voice calling, but that doesn't force iMessage to implement voice calling. It's simply saying that third parties can choose to implement the iMessage protocol if they want.
There may be features that will only work within one platform, but that won't give anyone a lock-in advantage since others can implement those features if they're popular. For example, let's say Apple implements CoolNewFeature. They have to publish the spec for CoolNewFeature. Sure, maybe it will take 6 months for Google and WhatsApp to implement CoolNewFeature, but there's nothing preventing them from doing so. Likewise, WhatsApp already has voice calling, but you won't be able to do that with iMessage folks because Apple hasn't implemented that. That seems ok to me. If Apple starts to lose users to WhatsApp, they'll want to implement that interoperability. If it isn't an important feature, it isn't important whether they implement it or not.
To me, it seems like this is about preventing companies from creating walled gardens. It's not about forcing companies to adopt certain standards or features. Apple doesn't need to adopt RCS. If others could send/receive iMessage-protocol messages, it would provide an interoperable system. Some might complain that X protocol is better than Y protocol, but that's the history of everything. Ultimately, those types of things haven't prevented third parties from creating interoperability with less perfect protocols.
Yes, and that kind of anticompetitive behavior is what the EU is trying to curb.
Just publishing the specs will not allow anyone to send/receive iMessages. It's built on a closed loop CA / certificate system.
Remember that Steve Jobs actually announced on-stage it would be an open protocol without actually discussing that with his engineers? The architecture is designed to be closed from the get-go, and opening up the iMessage ecosystem in it's current design is simply not possible without giving 3rd parties considerable access to Apple internals, affecting a ton of stuff beyond iMessage, and pose serious security risks.
Could Apple re-design a messaging system which would allow this and roll it out transparently to all it's users? Absolutely, but that would require a ton of engineering work, and won't be there tomorrow.
I would assume one downside is a higher amount of spam. Currently you need to have an Apple device to send an iMessage. So sending spam is an expensive proposition.
If I want to spam you I buy a bunch of numbers on Plivo and start sending your number messages with SMS, the existing standard. They show up in iMessage on your phone. The only difference is they're green instead of blue.
So, how do I need an iPhone to send you spam? iMessage doesn't do anything related to spam other than let you delete and report it.
But if it did work that way, then the standard could include that messages need to be signed with a device attestation key from an approved vendor or something like that. There could be a way to have your attestation keys registered like we do for CAs today so that your attestation hardware could be used. Phone manufacturers would all implement device attestation, like Apple and Google do.
I know the difference between SMS and iMessage. Currently I get plenty of SMS spam. I get pretty much zero iMessage spam. I’m pretty sure that I would get more spam if iMessage was made interoperable, even if device attestation was implemented as you described. Some Googling suggests that RCS, the competing standard for messaging, does not implement device attestation.
Right, I'm just genuinely confused. How would you meaningfully distinguish between the spam? Why would there be more of it? Wouldn't it just come in blue instead of green? I'm not sure I understand how adding a 2nd avenue for spammers opens new doors when the existing avenue is totally sufficient. Perhaps if you could send messages from an email only account is what you're saying? Personally I would hope there'd be ways to control unsolicited messages in the messaging apps and report spam to the carriers. And honestly I was thinking that as an sms replacement, messages from email-only accounts would be something different carriers would want to gate/control onto the network as they see fit. Or more ideally the protocol itself could require messages to be signed with device attestation keys. Why iMessage doesn't give me better spam management options for existing SMS is the real question.
But I think I see the miscommunication. I’m assuming that iMessage gains interoperability and thus there are more people who could potentially send spam. But I think you are arguing that SMS would be replaced with the more advanced, interoperable protocol. In that case, I understand your arguments why there would be the same amount or less spam.
Maybe we are not that interesting?
But I do get a spam call from time to time.
I am looking forward to Google being able to finally get ahold of my iMessage and hoover it into their surveillance capitalism machine. What a huge benefit to me!
RCS will have no effect on iMessage whatsoever. Messages between a homogeneous group of iOS users has no reason to touch Google owned (or other) RCS servers. And for Android users, RCS is a meaningful upgrade from traditional SMS.
Isn't RCS at this point a propriety Google protocol, not a standard? There aren't any 'or other' servers.
There are plenty. Like users thinking imessage is shit because of third party clients. Or taking away an app devs right to restrict how and where their app is used. You have no inherent right over how imessage is restricted. I mean, by what right or authority do you even get to even discuss forcing how a free(!) app is restricted or forcing an all network/server to provide services to arbitrary clients? If I block firefox on my webserver, will you or EU tell me I can't??
If those are the concerns against forcing them to open it, they shall force them now! I mean, lol...
>Or taking away an app devs right to restrict how and where their app is used. You have no inherent right over how imessage is restricted. I mean, by what right or authority do you even get to even discuss forcing how a free(!) app is restricted or forcing an all network/server to provide services to arbitrary clients?
There are no "inherent rights" period. Right comes from law, which ideally comes from what society deems worthy to have. If EU wants open messaging than can be made into a law. It's that simple.
Whether the app is free or not is irrelevant. It's enough a consideration that it occupies a big percentage of usage share, so having it close presents a moat against communicating with a big chunk of the population (and also restricts those using iOS just one client).
>If I block firefox on my webserver, will you or EU tell me I can't??
They very well could, if the right conditions applied...
Absolutley not true. The law codifies what is already true with respect to rights but the law also fails to codify rights as with womens rights and involuntary servitude, women and black people didn't suddenly gain rights when laws were passed, they've always had those rights except the law and society failed to recognize that until some point. Law or not there are fundamental and inalienable truths from which rights and obligations can be discerned.
> If EU wants open messaging than can be made into a law. It's that simple.
Yes and if EU wants to do any number unfair or dowright evil things they can, it is that simple. What is your point, did I dispute the simplicity?
I was talking about what consumers what and what service is being offered by Apple and the inherent unfairness towards one group of consumers and favoritism towards non-american electronic makers and developers. They claim to be democratic and support equality and fairness under the law and by that claim I can contend they are in the wrong by their own standards.
Any company and consumer would naturally be treated the same if the EU is not a banana republic and as such this affects everyone.
> Whether the app is free or not is irrelevant.
It is abdolutley vital! Commerce and trade can be regulated and taxed by government authorities but a free app is not commerce. This is regulation of speech and interaction between people. If apple at least had ads in iMessage it could be commerce but it isn't. You are throwing away your rights so u can satisfy some rage against a corporation you don't have to interact with.
> It's enough a consideration that it occupies a big percentage of usage share, so having it close presents a moat against communicating with a big chunk of the population (and also restricts those using iOS just one client)
So a big chunk of the population made a choice but the government should prevent them? Very democratic! You can pass laws forcing government services and entities to not use iMessage but even the US isn't banning tiktok outright or forcing them to be compatible with something they control because... you know, of the people, for the people and all that.
> They very well could, if the right conditions applied...
Yes and that is unfair and concerning because in a free society people have liberties that allow them a choice about who they want to interact with.
Some companies are becoming base infrastructure and so they need some regulation. What do you think if your piped water company would refuse to sell you water just because your house number ends with 8?
Nope. They got them when those laws were passed.
You might think that they always "should have had" those rights, which is valid, but different from "always had them".
But they absoltely didn't have them, and if they attempted to exercize them as if they had them, they'd be ignored, prevented, beaten up, or worse.
>Yes and if EU wants to do any number unfair or dowright evil things they can, it is that simple. What is your point, did I dispute the simplicity?
Yes, they could. You could perhaps argue morals (based on what? Your take of what's "unfair" and "downright evil"? Because I'm a European and I don't find this law unfair at all), and that could be discussed.
But you didn't discuss morals, you wrote "by what right or authority". Well, they have the right and the authority, so?
>I was talking about what consumers what and what service is being offered by Apple and the inherent unfairness towards one group of consumers and favoritism towards non-american electronic makers and developers.
Sorry, but if you come here to sell something, you better sell it on our terms and under EU laws. If you don't want to do that, you can always opt to not sell it.
Also, you don't know what "consumers want" in general. Did you ask consumers if they want to keep Messages closed?
Our disagreement is that you think a right is something granted by the law and inability to excecise a right means you don't have it. A right simply means there is a valid justification to allow a person to do not do something. You can have a right and it can unjustly be taken from you. The government or even the fundamental rule of law exists in part to enable justice and justice exists beyond the confines of law and government. If it is just for a person to or not do something and there is a valid and reasonable explanation for that thing then it is justifiable and preventing or coercing a person to contradict that would be unjust therefore it is a right. If the law fails to codify a right then the law is unjust with that respect.
To put it differently, after a law is passed to recognize a right, people can ask for compensation for past injustices even though in the past the injustice was legal. This is because despite legality, a person had rights and due to a failure of law and society that right was not protected and damage was done.
> But you didn't discuss morals, you wrote "by what right or authority". Well, they have the right and the authority, so?
Well that is what I am challenging. The EU or governments in general don't have absolute authority over all things. In the case of EU and democratic governments there is a contract of law between the people and the government defining the authority of the government. I don't know EU law well but in the US the government has the right to regulate commerce which iMessage as a free app is excluded. In a free society, unless the government has explicit authority to regulate something it can't just restrict what you do, that's the whole point of liberty. I was genuinely asking what authority the EU had to regulate the activity of offering a free service to the public that doesn't involve hosting content, only transporting messages. This authority if legit would mean the EU can for example interfere in moderation decisions by sites like HN.
> Sorry, but if you come here to sell something, you better sell it on our terms and under EU laws. If you don't want to do that, you
But nothing is being sold, iMessage is a free app so your point is invalid.
> Also, you don't know what "consumers want" in general. Did you ask consumers if they want to keep Messages closed?
There are people who prefer a closed messaging ecosystem. For people who want a more open system there is Signal, Wire,Briar, Threema, All the Matrix clients,etc... there is no shortage of optiond and most of them are supported on the iPhone. So you and the EU don't care about open apps being available to the EU. You just want to force others to not have a closes messaging system.
You're the bully here.
First off, arguably it's very much not free because it's only available if you purchase an Apple product. The cost of operating iMessage is built into the price you pay to use Apple's services and software when purchasing their hardware. I can't go to Apple.com and freely sign up for iMessage.
Second, I can't set up a free lemonade stand on my lawn and secretly add harmful substances to the lemonade and gov't can't touch me because I didn't charge a fee. I mean come on, that's not how the government works either.
We cede a monopoly on violence to the government so they may govern all aspects of life where we believe they are needed, not just commerce. In order to protect and maintain a free society, the government must discourage and punish people that encroach on other peoples' rights universally.
If we reach consensus that as a society the mechanism we use to communicate with each other should be standardized and open so that anybody may interoperate with it, because it's in line with a free society where we believe individuals have a right to the liberty of running their own software in whatever way they see fit (much like your choice of car or clothing), then that's that and the government can step in and try to protect those rights.
Without a law granting/protecting your right to X, or at least the power to grant it to yourself and enforce it, you don't have a right to X.
You, at best have, a "justification for having the right to X". And even that is debatable. You might just think you have a justification, but ther people might disagree with you that X is any kind of right you oughta have.
So, where does this "valid justification" comes from? God? Some holy book? Some wise document written by founding fathers? Sorry, we don't believe in those things in these here parts. It needs to be based on either law or a body (could be "the people") that can force it into law.
> But nothing is being sold, iMessage is a free app so your point is invalid.
Doesn't matter to my argument whether its paid, or given free as a lure to keep you in the ecosystem (which is the money maker) - or even just given free in general, out of the goodness of their heart.
If a company doesn't like the terms under which a country or union of countries asks them them to sell and/or give away their app, they can always stop giving it to that country/union of countries. Easy as that.
>You're the bully here.
"Bully" against a company? For making make their app more open and compatible? That's some next level Ayn Rand shit right here...
This is actually false. Our founding fathers very much were not settled on where rights originated. Some believed, like GP do, that rights are innate and that it's the responsibility of a government to try and protect common ones. Others believed, like you, that rights need to be enumerated. One of the arguments against enumeration is that such a list could be used, as you are trying to do, as a mechanism to exclude rights not officially listed or known or conceived of at the time, which could lead to unintended oppression.
Should the government have innate power to oppress by omission? Are laws an allow list or a deny list? Does the government only get the power we the people grant it, or does it get every power we don't specifically reserve for ourselves? Neither position is absolutely correct. That's why we have courts and process. But the scales tend to tip towards the government only only being allowed power we cede to it, not the reverse.
Here's a relevant example: consider freedom of thought. Western governments generally do not explicitly codify such a concept. But we practically universally believe that human beings are afforded the the privacy of their mind. After all we're allowed to express ourselves freely and all our laws are designed to punish actions. The bill of rights was created at a time when it was impossible to know the nature of someone's thoughts, so this question was preposterous. But it's becoming possible now to capture an image of one's thoughts. If we could use that information to discriminate, it's very sane to imagine a self-serving bureaucracy would try to. So how do you establish your right to think in a society where it's innately oppressed by virtue of not being explicitly granted? See: civil disobedience.
I agree with your position but not with your rhetoric.
Did you ever look into what happened with XMPP extensions?
Just open the standard/api/protocol, document it, and it'll get integrated into pidgin or some other alternative within a few days. Currently it's not a problem of not having apps trying to integrate protocols, but protocol designers intentionally locking other apps out of the ecosystem.
This is incidentally the reason moxie cited for not making Signal federated.
And yes, it might mean that only one client would support a shiny new feature for a while. But that's exactly the situation with iMessage, s/for a while/forever/.
Absolutely. These corporations laugh all the way to the bank as they destroy our privacy and exploit us for profit with surveillance capitalism, destroy our computer freedoms with hardware cryptography only they have the keys for, pollute our web with unending advertising and annoyances driven by "engagement engineering". Someone really ought to check their goddamn audacity. My only complaint is the fines aren't big and frequent enough to surpass their cost of doing business.
I'm sorry, I just don't feel sorry at all about the trillion dollar corporations. Maybe they should try not being monopolists who want to own the platform and their users. Then maybe the state won't feel the need to remind them we are not cattle to be sold to the highest bidder.
The others, this law is trying to force interaction with, not just did, but actively and aggressively do.
To the point that Brian Acton of WhatsApp walked away from a billion dollars and donated $50M to Signal rather that watch it happen.
Tell that to its threats to do client side scanning on what's supposed to be our devices. The fact they can even get away with even suggesting such crap points to the fact their crimes are a lot worse and more fundamental than privacy violations: they destroyed our fundamental computer freedoms by denying us the capability to run or not run whatever software we want. Under Apple and its peers, we are oppressed at a fundamental level by being forced to accept whatever bullshit whims a corporation decides to impose upon us with a software update. They have the keys to the machine, they determine what code it runs and doesn't run.
> The others, this law is trying to force interaction with, not just did, but actively and aggressively do.
They are not excused either. They should be sanctioned even harder until they cease and desist all exploitative behavior.
Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer? What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better but this policy is making things harder to implement because it would be impossible to make it interoperate with other messaging apps?
I don't get why you would regulate such a thing. I get the feeling that people here enjoy seeing big tech companies "owned" by big governments without actually realising that it is actually going to make things worse, that's what regulation does in most cases.