Apple is not preventing anyone from downloading beeper, or giving beeper money, or running beeper software. They are exercising control over their own servers.

My understanding of tortious interference is that it is broader than actually preventing others from using a service. Even just saying things to dissuade them from doing business with a company can qualify.

Really weird that a disinterested third party like Apple would even make loud public statements about Beeper.

Blocking interpretability could be illegal, especially as they near market dominance

iMessage is nowhere near market dominance. As evidenced by the ease of use and popularity of alternatives such as SMS/Whatsapp/Signal/Wechat/etc

I agree. The obsession with "blue bubbles" is something I only hear about from tech writers. No one I communicate with in the real world has ever mentioned it. Supposedly teenagers care about this, but that seems like a poor basis for anti-trust action.

At the same time, I miss the era of rich third party client ecosystems for things like AIM or MSN messenger. Blocking interoperability is a bummer for innovation.

>Supposedly teenagers care about this,

Android vs iPhone is definitely a thing people in their 20s and 30s even use to judge others. I have polled quite a few family/friends, and it is near unanimous that it is a dealbreaker in dating, mostly because they assume there is a higher likelihood they will not mesh with the type of person the non iPhone user is.

>but that seems like a poor basis for anti-trust action.

Correct.

Apple would claim that you pay for the iMessage service as part of the purchase price of hardware and software. From this perspective it's not blocking interoperability, it's blocking theft.

Whether that argument holds is for governments and courts to decide, ultimately.

Yes. And I'm saying, were this a live issue (I don't think it is), the graver liability might be for Beeper interfering with Apple's contracts with its users.

In what way would Beeper's action cause Apple's customers to breach a contract with Apple? I would think most of the people who would purchase a service like this would be Android users, not iPhone users. Some of them might own Macs, but what would be the contract that the user would be breaching that would result in damage to Apple?

If they're "just Android users", they don't have iMessage accounts.

So your thinking is that these end-users have signed some sort of agreement with Apple, and that agreement says they won't use any unauthorized services to connect to Apple servers, or some such thing?

That's not "my thinking" so much as it is a fact.

If it’s a fact then it should be no trouble to share the relevant provision.

I was sharing that theory as a conjecture, since I have no reason to believe such a provision exists.