Maybe so; it doesn't really matter when you're looking at damages. It's Apple's job to solve interoperability with their own platform, and not only have they failed to provide SMS-levels of interop, they actively work against it to promote ulterior products. It's exactly the sort of anticompetitive bundling that harms the market without improving competition.
Maybe Ma Bell's success was in-part due to their free long-distance calls. It's kinda moot speculation when you look at their top-down business strategy though.
Nobody provides SMS levels of interop on unrestricted internet messaging platforms because the experience sucks.
Running the IM equivalent of an open SMTP relay is a ghastly experience for users. You literally have to gatekeep because the alternative is going back to circa-2000 levels of spam.
Deep down you know exactly what would happen because we’ve all lived it with spam voice calls again recently - we’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s warranty…
Destroying a working, positive experience on the apple platform and dragging it down to 2000s level is the explicit goal for a lot of people. The pain is the point - not to bring android up but simply to tear things down and walk away.
> You literally have to gatekeep because the alternative is going back to circa-2000 levels of spam.
The vast majority of spam is explicitly permitted by Google. What are you talking about? Do you not use e-mail? They have a Promotions tab, they could make spam - that is, marketing emails - go away in an afternoon, if they wanted to. They just don't, because those same companies are Google Ads customers.
Marketing email subscriptions you were tricked into signing up for isn't what people consider spam. In fact, Google provides a nice feature to unsubscribe from those without looking for a link in the email.
Now, the spam argument for iMessage makes little sense IMO - you're still going to get the same message via SMS. However, with Apple in charge, there is a chance that there will be some kind of "report + temporal ban" feature. Carriers have no incentive to create such feature.
> The vast majority of spam is explicitly permitted by Google. What are you talking about?
It is certainly not lmao - try sending mail to google from your own smtp server on your own doma
Seeing some spam occasionally doesn’t mean the vast majority isn’t being rej
> They have a Promotions tab, they could make spam - that is, marketing emails - go away in an afternoon, if they wanted to.
opting into newsletters is explicitly not spam, so either you don’t understand the basics of being on the internet or you’re arguing in bad faith.
Which is probably also implied by the “I saw a spam once therefore google runs an open SMTP relay” take honestly. You know that’s not true either. We both know you know. Why are you doing this?
again:
Google doesn’t provide your desired standard of openness either, in their own oligopolistic fiefs/gatekeeper domains like gmail. And everyone understand why it’s a bad idea. Forced open interop is an unworkable idea and forcing an unworkable idea on iMessage is the whole goal. Flooding iMessage with spam 2000s-style by forcing an “open relay” into the system is the whole point, whether you realize it or not.
Just like forcing “choice of browser” was never about giving users freedom either - but about wiping away the last counterbalance against chrome’s dominance/monopoly in the browser market. Hence the flood of shit like web integrity and adtech ever since.
C'mon. Signing up for a store to buy a thing doesn't grant permission to bother me with a newsletter, you very frequently just can't opt out until they've sent you something.
That's the "I'm not touching you" of compliance and spam-in-spirit should have a mudhole stomped into it--and yet does not.
Store newsletters that you sign up for are not spam. Nobody is making you click the "allow marketing emails" checkboxes. If they do it anyway, yes, that's spam, but that's not what actually happens.
You sound like me, when I was 22 and worked on a virtual slot machine game, trying to convince people that a virtual slot machine game was a real game in some sense.
Anyway, I think what everyone wants is an email tab called “Personal and Transactional,” which would omit all emails of all other categories, including marketing or spam or whatever you want to call it. And even then, I find it so fucking annoying that my ISP and my bank sends me marketing emails via its transactional domains, obviously with the blessing of Google, because people mark those as spam and yet their domains are not blocked. Google already has the capability to do this easily, and chooses not to because email marketers are part of their customer ecosystem.
> Nobody provides SMS levels of interop on unrestricted internet messaging platforms because the experience sucks.
Maybe Apple should lead the charge on that, or instead they'll be forced to use something truly godawful like OMEMO or RCS. I'd prefer they didn't, but it would be pretty funny if they were forced down that path in the long-run. It takes a haughty spirit before the fall.
> Destroying a working, positive experience on the apple platform and dragging it down to 2000s level is the explicit goal for a lot of people.
A more believable motive than being one of the millions of non-Apple customers that are subject to using an inferior messaging standard? Apple made their bed by believing they could proprietate a public resource; now you've got to lie in it because you're their customer. Frankly I (and regulators) could care less what iMessage looks like once it's all done. It's apparently not our platform.
Exactly. Apple has more influence over the cellular industry in America than any single company including the carriers themselves.
They could completely design the spec by themselves with all the pro-consumer features that one could imagine including things like distributed spam filtering and then force the carriers to adopt it either by using the stick (force adoption by X date or lose the iPhone) or the carrot (shift proprietary iMessage features to the new standard so that users demand the carrier adopt it -- basically green bubble any carrier that doesn't use the standard). No other company in the country could do this.
But of course, complete control over a proprietary iMessage protocol that they can lock competitors out of is apart of the business strategy.
Why shackled to SMS?
I don't have an iPhone don't use iMessager and haven't sent a SMS in the past 10 years.
Everything these days is What'sApp / Telegram / Signal
