Irrelevant. Apple and iMessage today are not what Apple and iMessage were when iMessage was released. When a company gets large enough, they are held to a different standard. And for good reason. Waiting for Apple to become a monopoly before enforcing competition and consumer protection laws is, for lack of a better word, stupid. Apple is at risk of becoming a monopoly in this space and it needs to be dealt with before it's too late.
> I'd suggest that the very fact that they had the discussion shows that the intention was never to be a multiplatform messaging client. They don't compete in that market. I also see anything inherently wrong with having sticky features which go to differentiating a product to make churning, or steering sales decisions a harder choice.
Market competition isn’t the only issue here. Consumer protection is as well. Apple is doing something called “tying”. iPhones and Macs are the tied product and iMessage is the tying product (iMessage being free is irrelevant, it is nonetheless a product and it is a product that can operate independently from the tied product as has been established by Beeper). Tying needn’t affect all consumers, it just needs to be shown that there is a demand for the tying product sans the tied product. It also doesn’t need to be shown that Apple has the majority of the market. There are examples of illegal tying where the company doing it has a lower, but not insignificant, market share.
Beeper shows that there is a demand for iMessage independent of an iPhone. iMessage is now (what it was is irrelevant) a tying product. There is demand for communicating between users utilizing the iMessage platform without having to use an iPhone or another of Apple's tied products (that some Apple users want iMessage exclusivity is irrelevant).
> Ultimately, there are choices and kids can have Android handsets and communicate securely and for free with multiple differnt apps.
It’s also disingenuous to try to differentiate the market while simultaneously suggesting alternatives that supposedly replace the tying product. Either iMessage is in its own market or it's not. But even that doesn't matter, because it is actually up to the consumer to decide what the market is. The truth is that iMessage is in the same market as other messaging apps, but is being unfairly used as a tying product.
Of course Apple doesn't want iMessage to be cross-platform, but consumers don't want to be forced to choose what they see as an inferior tied product (regardless of Apple fans' beliefs about Apple's superiority, Apple fans don't represent all consumers, only some of them). To keep the market fair for consumers, Apple has to be held to a higher standard, which means unbundling iMessage and making it available on non-Apple devices or opening the protocol to third parties.
