This is a wonderful speech full of noble platitudes. None of this actually answers the question of why Apple (or really anyone) should let anyone have free and open access to something they paid and keep paying a lot to create, deploy, maintain, and iterate on. It’s their stuff, not the public’s. Nobody should expect corporations to be charities.

We force companies to incur costs for the public's benefit all the time. In special cases we even require them to serve loss generating customers as a condition of operation. No one is forced to operate a power company, but if you do you are bound to provide power to customers regardless of their individual profitability. Similarly, dominant vertically-integrated messaging systems could be required to provide interoperability at a reasonable charge (or even no charge!). Apple could then decide whether or not they want to operate a system under those terms.

Or, to expand a bit:

If Apple should be expected to open up iMessage, then why shouldn't Facebook be expected to allow interoperability with Messenger, and Telegram and Signal forced to open those up, too?

Or, if you wish to take it a slightly different way: Why shouldn't the New York Times be expected to give everyone a copy of their paper for free? Information and good journalism are a public good, after all.

Why shouldn't pharmaceutical companies be expected to make all life-saving medications available for free?

Why shouldn't ISPs be expected to make Internet access available to all for free?

I mean, we could structure our society so that everything wasn't arbitrarily gated but that would be gasp socialism.

Also, Telegram and Signal are already open and can be bridged from anything to anything so yeah, we should force Messenger and Imessage to accept, at a minimum, bridging as well.

To be honest, I personally agree that we should be forcing at least some of these things for the common good (and, to the extent necessary, funding them with significantly-more-progressive taxes). My point is primarily that it's not particularly logical to single out Apple for this treatment if that's your principle.

Good to know about Telegram and Signal—I don't use or know much about them. IMNSHO, my argument still holds even removing them from the equation.

OK! Let's assume you've built a water delivery system, a series of pipes. You attach anyone who buys a licensed faucet, and collect a modest monthly payment, as a typical utility would do. You use these funds to cover the operation costs of the pipe system.

Your pipes use a standard threaded connector.

If somebody attaches to your pipes without buying your licensed faucet and without paying, just due to the interoperability of threaded pipes, do you have the right to disconnect them, and rework your pipe connectors in a way that prevents unpaid connections in the future? If not, why?

Any sane company with the goal of making money from operating a service would just meter water from a device they own and charge a reasonable fee. Most of the people complaining would be completely fine with Apple charging a reasonable fee for Android access to iMessage. A system like yours would only make sense if your goals had nothing to do with covering the costs of operating the service, and were instead growing and maintaining your licensed faucet marketshare. Some people might think that isn't in the public's benefit and want to change the law. In the case of water services we already have, and the licensed faucet scheme would likely be illegal basically everywhere in the US.

At my last house, we had a private well and, later, a private company laid water pipes in the street and offered for us to connect to them via their own meter. I don't think anything was illegal about that company offering for me to rent a meter from them for the ~$10/mo connection [aka "meter rental"] fee, and use whatever mix of water that I wanted from their metered source or my own well, provided I had a backflow preventer to prevent any of my well water from entering their metered water lines.

If someone chooses not to rent an Orange water meter, they can't have Orange water. That seems like a choice that Orange can make. Changing Orange to Apple and water meter to smartphone messaging, I don't see any inherent reason why the rules should be different.

> Changing Orange to Apple and water meter to smartphone messaging, I don't see any inherent reason why the rules should be different.

Their choice of what water meter to use is completely transparent to you provided it works properly. It has no effect on how you use the service or any other aspect of your life. This is obviously not true of phones. The bundling of separate product categories is what makes the situation different, the same way that bundling water service with the arbitrary requirement of a "licensed faucet" would likely be illegal many places.