Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU
Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU
The DMA’s interoperability requirement won’t apply.
Not surprising considering iMessage is nearly irrelevant outside the US.
US is still stuck on SMS, so much that they even made an upgrade to it with RCS.
It felt like an upgrade to the DVD disk when you have the Internet.
DVDs are still not bad if someone really wants to buy a movie. Cheaper than BluRay and with much weaker DRM. Video is very low quality in today's standards, but bitrate and autio quality is better than any streaming.
I know a nice comparason, faxes. Imagine a fax 2.0 protocol released just before sending documents by email become normal that do not got adapted, but all of a sudden Google start promoting it as nudging Apple to adapt it. Advertised as a better quality, faster fax, with (yet ro standardize) encryption.
It supports encryption and all they had to do was type “y” when setting it up.
The Nordics are an exception to this - SMS and iMessage are prevalent here.
I'm more disappointed by their decision to not consider Microsoft's Edge and Bing as core platforms, even though the former is being pushed way too hard in Windows and the later is used as part of other search engines' indexes (ie. DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Qwant)
Qwant actually have their own indexer, but even then I feel like Microsoft can push their own products as they want given you are free to ignore it... It's not like there's no alternative browsers, search engine indices or operating systems, and loads of other products are built off shared technology without it being an issue that it's closed off generally
Wait, Duck Duck Go is powered by Bing?
I think the core platform user threshold is a sensible way to determine core platforms. I don't know if bing has so many users and what its market share is.
I think the situation with edge is different though, it should not be allowed to be forced down to windows users by bundling without allowing the user to decide which default browser to use first.
I have been following the DMA closely, and so far it has been a big disappointment, just as I expected.
The way the EU approaches this walled garden problem, is to try and offer ways for other competitors to tap into the user base of the bigger players instead of trying to allow all EU citizens to chat with any other EU citizen who uses META Products regardless of their host platform. meaning "us" people who wish to self host an xmpp or Matrix servers and chat with facebook friends, It won't be straight forward or entirely possible for us to do so. unless maybe by doing a KYC with META. and signing up very stringent service agreements.
Meta will be creating all sorts of hurdles the DMA laws will allow them to, to cripple interoperability, from making other plateform signing up to special permissions from Meta, to hiding interoperability settings and making them opt-in, and building a scary rhetoric why you shouldn't be allowing other people outside of META to get in contact with you. There are some valid concerns, but I suspect Meta will implement the most spiteful procedures they can get away with, then spin up a rhetoric about proving their users being massing against interoperability.
It's funny how a few short years ago both FB and Google ran with jabber and jingle and we were accidentally chatting between one another.
Seems they just need to roll the code back and they're set.
Makes the upcoming spite just a little more bitter.
The way the EU approaches this walled garden problem, is to try and offer ways for other competitors to tap into the user base of the bigger players instead of trying to allow all EU citizens to chat with any other EU citizen who uses META Products regardless of their host platform.
Probably because of spam? I don't think you can open up all the communicators to every self hosted server there is. It would be a disaster.
I don't think I ever got spam from any jabber server even when google and Facebook were running them. You still have to opt in to messages from something. If I had to guess ,I'd guess every chat service is still an xmpp server under a surface level encryption.
That's a very bad call from them. I'm disappointed.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Commission also opted against designating Microsoft’s Edge browser, Bing search engine, and advertising business as core platform services.
Although it designated Apple’s App Store, Safari browser, and iOS operating system as core platform services, it held off on making a final decision on iMessage until an investigation could be completed.
Although iMessage has avoided the burden of complying with rules that comes with the official DMA designation, the period of regulatory scrutiny coincided with Apple announcing support for the cross-platform RCS messaging standard on iPhones, which Google has been pushing for.
Apple has made it clear that it’ll support the cross-platform standard alongside iMessage; it’s not replacing the company’s proprietary messaging service.
Apple’s Safari browser, iOS operating system, and App Store still have to comply with the regulation’s strictest requirements when DMA comes fully into force on March 7th.
Apple recently announced a range of changes it’s making to comply with the regulation, which include allowing alternative app stores and browser engines other than WebKit.
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