If you ran a business and provided a service to your paying customers, should you be forced to offer it gratis to anyone who wants to use it? That’s an absurd position.
Yes, it is absurd. It's a great strawman.
A more realistic option would be to say that Apple has to sell access to its infrastructure via the API its own app uses, at a cost allowing some reasonable profit; this would conveniently align with other court decisions regarding anti-competitive practices by incumbent providers with strong market positions.
(disclaimer: Android user, wish users had stopped bothered with iMessage already and switched to something else)
>This might be true if Apple was a small company. But they aren’t. They control more than 50% of the US smartphone market, and lock customers into using Apple’s official app for texting (which, in the US, sadly, is the default way people communicate). Large companies that dominate their industry must follow a different set of rules that govern fair competition, harm to consumers and barriers to innovation. We are not experts in antitrust law, but Apple’s actions have already caught the attention of US Congress and the Department of Justice
This is pretty different to the international dynamic, as MMS often comes at a surcharge in many non-US markets, but here unlimited MMS has been included in most plans for a very long time, so there's not even a "hey, you are costing me money" stigma involved like there was in the bad old days decades ago.
making an antitrust case on the basis of "I don't want to guess" seems weak, but law can always turn out counterintuitive
That... doesn't solve the problem. We don't need fragmented messaging systems, we need the world's largest company to lay down some rules and abide by them. Right now, the existence of iMessage is predicated on the poor performance of traditional SMS messaging. It wouldn't surprise me if the United States (much like Europe's antitrust council) forced Apple to standardize their proprietary alternatives. There's nothing counterintuitive about that to me.
It doesn't matter how many other networks there are when you can't get your group to use those instead.
It forces Apple to explicitly do the equivalent of Microsoft making competing word processors malfunction in DOS to pressure people to use Microsoft Word.
> How is it much different from blocking a hacker who's poking around to find holes?
That's the easy one. Interoperability is legitimate, credit card fraud isn't.