Google turns to regulators to make Apple open up iMessage::iMessage serves should be regulated under the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), Google and a group of major European telcos has told the European Commission.
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Irony meters everywhere explode
So that was the pop noise that woke me!
No, for real, why are these posts filled with comments from people acting like Apple needs to be defended on this? It hurts absolutely no one except Apples stock holders and makes a better messaging environment for everyone.
So why the hell are you playing defense for a 2 trillion dollar company when all they’re being asked to do is not fuck over other phone users?
Because its cool to hate Google on Lemmy
If the alternative is trusting Google I’d rather stick with SMS. Implementing their closed source version of RCS would be a mistake. I’d half expect them to inject ads into the messages
seeing people get all upset and bothered and acting like white knights for corporations that would instantly f them over first chance they get to make a buck was always a boost to my confidence, no matter what happens at least i will never be that stupid.
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“Through iMessage, business users are only able to send enriched messages to iOS users and must rely on traditional SMS for all the other end users,”
I don’t see how that’s weird at all? I can send “enriched messages” to other Discord users, but I can’t do that from Discord to Matrix. Or from Discord to SMS. I can’t text my friend’s Instagram either. I don’t dare say whether or not I can mail a post onto the fediverse because that definitely sounds like some niche functionality someone has implemented (or thought to implement) somewhere.
Doesn’t Google have that exact same thing anyway?
What a weird thing to take issue with. Like yeah I’d obviously prefer it if there was a widely adopted open standard that everyone could use, but that’s not how capitalism works, is it?
but that’s not how capitalism works, is it?
That’s why regulation exists.
Oh I’d love for our governments to get their collective hands out of their arseholes and actually start regulating.
Wouldn’t it be nice
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The invisible hand of the free market just came a little.
Isn’t government intervention the opposite of the “free market?”
Yes. But exploitation of rules is the essence of capitalism.
SMS is truly open and isn’t overseen by any central authority. Although obviously your carrier needs to support it, you aren’t forced to choose from among a few SMS providers. As I understand, RCS is a partially proprietary protocol under the guise of an open standard. As I understand, your carrier doesn’t handle RCS. Instead it’s routed through an RCS provider, and that provider is currently an extension of Google.
To me it seems like RCS is just Google’s attempt to take over text messaging, and even though SMS has some serious flaws, I feel like a corporate controlled system is even worse.
Am I wrong about RCS? Is it really an open standard? When I search for details, it’s mostly about how SMS is bad with pictures and thus RCS is great, but nothing about how RCS makes its way from one phone to another.
From what I have read regarding RCS it seems you are not wrong. I also read the tech it’s based on is ancient.
Steve Jobs in his announcement of FaceTime back in 2010 said it was gonna be open-source. That never happened.
They wanted it to work with a peer to peer protocol, but then got sued by a company I can’t remember, so they instead relied on relay servers.
Sure, you could use FaceTime on Android and Windows (and I guess Linux and FreeBSD), but you have to visit a specific website and have an invite link from someone who has an Apple device. Not very open-source if you ask me.
Walled gardens make money, and add frustration.
FaceTime on other platforms is like a year or 2 old feature.
I know. It’s actually two years old.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The letter arrives as the European Commission investigates whether iMessage meets the requirements to be regulated under the bloc’s strict DMA rules.
Google has been very vocal about its desire for Apple to adopt RCS, the cross-platform messaging standard pitched as the successor to SMS, with its #GetTheMessage campaign.
“Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy,” Google senior vice-president Hiroshi Lockheimer posted on X, then known as Twitter, last year.
The letter, which the FT notes was signed by an unnamed Google senior vice-president along with the CEOs of Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, and Orange, argues that iMessage meets the threshold for being a core platform service under the Digital Markets Act.
The company pointed The Financial Times towards a statement that says “consumers today have access to a wide variety of messaging apps, and often use many at once, which reflects how easy it is to switch between them.”
According to the Commission, Apple has previously argued that iMessage isn’t popular enough in the EU to warrant being designated as a core platform service, and that it lacks support for business-focused features like APIs.
The original article contains 528 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Hummm, Google must have metrics directly associated with people moving to Apple because of this issue to put resources on it.
Why not Signal protocol?
Signal protocol only encrypts things, it doesent deliver them
I don’t have a problem with the delivery companies delivering encrypted text. Its when they insist on participating in the “decryption process” that one has to put their foot down.
