Last century it was bell whining about customers connecting unauthorized equipment to their network. This century, it's apple whining about customers connecting unauthorized equipment to their apis.
This is really it. It's exactly the same scenario and it would be great if it could be restated for the new networks we use today. History repeats itself.
iMessage infrastructure belongs solely to Apple. It’s a value add for people who hit their products. What is owed to people who are not their customers?
If you ran a business and provided a service to your paying customers, should you be forced to offer it gratis to anyone who wants to use it? That’s an absurd position.
> If you ran a business and provided a service to your paying customers, should you be forced to offer it gratis to anyone who wants to use it? That’s an absurd position.
Yes, it is absurd. It's a great strawman.
A more realistic option would be to say that Apple has to sell access to its infrastructure via the API its own app uses, at a cost allowing some reasonable profit; this would conveniently align with other court decisions regarding anti-competitive practices by incumbent providers with strong market positions.
Yes, I own the physical hardware that the tokens are coming from. I own an (out of date, but still legit) iPhone 6, as well as a new Mac. I have paid Apple that which they would demand of any normal customer, and now I want the messages to flow to my Android phone and my Linux/Windows Desktop.
So it's very different. Beeper connects to Apple's service without an agreement or payment. The issue with Bell was with paying customers. No one was asking Bell to allow people without an account with them to connect.
Pretty sure if an alternate phone networks existed, it was free to switch to them, and they had billions of users already, antitrust case against bell would have no merit.
(disclaimer: Android user, wish users had stopped bothered with iMessage already and switched to something else)
