iPhone market share is above 80% in my country (Denmark), and smartphone ownership among adults is close to 100%. At that point, you're infrastructure.

If that's how the Danish feel, it makes more sense for Denmark to pass its own laws than rather than the EU, but I would posit that even at 80% marketshare, that's not enough to warrant the level of demands even from the Government of Denmark alone that the EU is imposing on Apple because in all the ways that matter for public purposes, the iPhone is already open enough: telephony, message exchange, open standards on the web, Bluetooth, I mean you name it, and if it's not a QoL thing like AirPlay or AirDrop, it's already there.

I disagree; 80% is plenty.

Elaborate if you’re going to disagree on why 80% is the magic number that means a supposedly liberal society should govern the QoL features of a foreign corporation’s product that already adheres to open standards on the communications hardware and software.

> telephony, message exchange, open standards on the web, Bluetooth

Things that existed before iPhones and that Apple cannot lock down? I'm glad they're open, but I won't give Apple credit. Particularly when they gently slid people out of SMS and into iMessage, for example. (Google did this less too but less successfully and are also at fault.)

Yes, the things that matter to a phone as far as the essentials go. I’m not saying give them credit, I’m saying that in every way that matters, the iPhone is already open, and the rest is Apple’s platform.

> Particularly when they gently slid people out of SMS and into iMessage, for example.

Or put another way, certainly the way it was perceived of at the time by their customers then and now: gave their customers a superior messaging experience over what was typically available to cell phones at the time that they wouldn’t be charged for. RIM also did this with BlackBerry Messenger. Then and now iMessage is a selling point for their phones, not the future of mobile messaging out of some misguided noblesse oblige or something that they owe the world (and by world I mean their competitors and non-iPhone customers) simply because they made it and people like it because it’s actually good–and for a long time it had its hiccups, but better than SMS was a low bar.

> when you develop features to distinguish yourself from the competition that stand out and make your own product better, but then the government comes along and tells you that you have to give that away,

Crippling a standard to reduce interoperability is not making a product better.

And what exactly did they cripple to reduce interoperability?

> When the incentive is that when you develop features to distinguish yourself from the competition

The value of a networked feature goes up with the number of nodes implementing it. A product that is able to send files/stream media to all products is more valuable than one limited to sending to products of its own brand.

If this was true in general all social networks would be interoperable.

You may value a product like that more but imo it’s not the way it works in practice.

It is true in general but for users, not for corporations that profit from walled gardens.

Correlation != causation. Furthermore, the business models of a phone manufacturer are much different from a social media platform. Most phone manufacturers still make the bulk of their money directly from the end-user paying them cash (either for the device itself, or associated services), where as social media platforms primarily make their money from renting access to their captive audience to advertisers.

What you’re describing is true, but the iPhone runs general purpose software. They don’t have to give away their own features to their competitors and people who aren’t their customers, and it’s more valuable to them as something they took the time to develop as a point of differentiation to give their customers a better experience than they would otherwise have.

An iPhone can already send files or stream media to all products provided you negotiate the protocol by which you do it and the software is available or you write it yourself. YouTube has Google Cast built into it, which you don’t have to use with an Apple TV because AirPlay will work, but if you say wanted to put video from your phone up on a Samsung smart TV, it’s an option. If you want to transfer files from an iPhone, you are not lacking in options, but if it’s to another iPhone or a Mac, AirDrop is just one of those options.