Are you employed or vested in this industry? This rhetoric is disingenuous and can be seen as bad faith argumentation. We are, rather explicitly, not talking about mere design decisions. We’re actually discussing the functionality of one of the largest messaging providers in the world with one the largest valuations in the world. You should keep the facts of the topic in mind and not detour into baseless hypotheticals that are antithetical to TFA.

> Where, even, is the disrespect in being a mere option amongst many?

We’re not talking about a guy in his garage. When a company, as large as apple, provides a service they enter a social contract to provide a reasonable quality of service for all users. Apple is willfully and repeatedly violating this contract. Hence, they are being held to account by the governments comprised of their users and enacting the will of said governments constituents.

>It’s not like Apple is forcing people to buy into their ecosystem.

By deliberately differentiating between customers and non customers in the quality of service experienced by their customers and those non customers their customers communicate with they are exerting market force. TFA is about the EU responding to this force with force.

> how does interoperability across messaging apps even look like, and does the idea even make sense?

This is likely the purview of an organization like ISO. If this is such an alien idea to you, perhaps you should expound on your perspective because at first blush it seems to me that you don’t understand the history of how modern communications were developed and implemented.