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Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

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Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#181

Post by hpeter »

ghaff wrote: post #116
bombcar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, most Americas do not text anyone outside of the country, and haven't really ever. So people had no real reason to move off of texting, because it just worked, and Apple's iMessage just looks like texting seamlessly.

Yeah, as an American who actually knows a fair number of people overseas, there are probably a literal handful of people who I communicate with on a regular basis there and I use a variety of channels but SMS/iMessage works fine one a day-to-day basis for most folks.

As an European who lived in multiple countries, I haven't used SMS in 10 years for anything other than 2FA.

Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#182

Post by hpeter »

mrweasel wrote: post #117
ghusto wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the U.S.A., people use iMessage by default, because they use text messaging. People don't use texts in Europe (we use WhatsApp and similar, but WhatsApp by a long margin). The reason people still use texts in the U.S.A. is up for debate, and it's something I've thought about for a long time.

One really weird way that you can see that is looking at Denmark, which has historically been used as a test market for telcos. SMS was practically free when iMessage was announced, not entirely, but enough people had unlimited SMS plans at that time. Denmark was the testing ground for different phones and pricing plans, better to screw up in a market with 5 million people, compared to one with 80 million. I believe…

IOS is the dominating mobile OS in Denmark, everyone I know uses iMessage.

I wonder if the 0.5 cent fee on free installs will change anything, will the train ticketing app start charging a subscription fee on IOS now that they need to pay per install Apple?

Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#183

Post by hpeter »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #162
elevatedastalt wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In short, all the things Google or Microsoft are criticized for are Okay when Apple does it.

No, it has rather obvious technical implications that people like to pretend do not exist. Those features people use are effectively not portable to other platforms short of making iOS run on other people's hardware. Sure, the messaging might be portable, ignoring the security concerns, but iMessage is used for a lot more than that. In short, any portable version would still be nerfed, just slightly less nerfed than…

The green bubbles will remain to coerce people to message IOS users over android as people favor blue over ugly green..

It's a marketing gimmick designed to lock users in using network effects.

These psychological tricks work the best on teenagers and apple have been targeting kids to make them customers for life.

Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#184

Post by jamesrr39 »

cgearhart wrote: post #163
jamesrr39 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a diagram, but here is the summary of obligations: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en#what-d... > Examples of the “do’s”: gatekeepers will for example have to: > - allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations; > - allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform; > - provide compa…

I disagree about the benefits for folks in the US. The EU moves comparatively quickly in law and is quite comfortable experimenting with regulations. The US by comparison feels very slow and deferential—almost as if when it’s not explicitly illegal then we should presume there’s no harm. I think any “openness” that leaks out of the EU will just be exploited in the US by platform-level companies to the detriment of in…

I get your point. But on the other hand you can look at GDPR and see after it that California passed the CCPA, Canada passed their own PIPEDA data privacy act, etc, so there is some precedent for other jurisdictions passing similar laws in the future.

Companies and services that come out of this regulation may end up competing in the US anyway and creating a more competitive landscape there anyway, even if there is no DMA-style legislation passed there.

We will see!

Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#185

Post by bombcar »

hpeter wrote: post #181
ghaff wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as an American who actually knows a fair number of people overseas, there are probably a literal handful of people who I communicate with on a regular basis there and I use a variety of channels but SMS/iMessage works fine one a day-to-day basis for most folks.

As an European who lived in multiple countries, I haven't used SMS in 10 years for anything other than 2FA.

It’s like Internet Explorer was for downloading Chrome; SMS is for authentication to get your WhatsApp running.

Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#186

Post by crazygringo »

alberto180 wrote: post #179
crazygringo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinarily few people reach the cycle limit of the SSD on their Mac. That's not something to worry about for probably 99.999% of people, so it's just a weird thing to bring up. And how do you know you're not seeing many old MacBooks? The MBA was launched over a decade and a half ago and it still looks almost identical to a casual observer.

That's why there are so many reports about M1 Notebooks dying after 3/4 years out there. There are huge noticeable differences between a 10 year MBA and a recent one

Except there aren't reports of that. Just tried googling and couldn't find anything about SSD failure actually happening. What I did find was some fearmongering back in 2021 about whether it might become a thing, but it seems like it was entirely hypothetical and never actually happened.

Also the M1 has only been around for a little over 3 years. They can't be dying after 4 years because they're not that old.

Where are you getting all this misinformation from? And why are you motivated to be repeating it?

Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#187

Post by danaris »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #124
GeekyBear wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting The iPhone itself launched with unlimited data, but limited text messages. > keep in mind that AT&T's default rate plans for the iPhone don't include unlimited SMS messages: they include 200 messages per month unless you add an extra-SMS plan. Chatting this way can easily rack up your SMS charges if you're not careful. htt…

> When iMessage launched as part of iOS 5, free unlimited SMS was still not a normal thing. It wasn’t universal on all wireless plans, for sure, but by 2011, in the U.S., it was definitely more common that at least for smartphone plans, which were starting to shift into charging for amounts of data usage rather than blanket “unlimited” buckets and were also starting to charge extra fees for tethering (this is also th…

> But mostly blue bubbles.

This is utterly ahistorical.

No one cared about blue bubbles when iMessage launched, because it hadn't yet become symbolic of "in the ecosystem, can be in group chats without breaking certain features." (In fact, I'm not even sure how many of the user-facing group chat features that break with SMS were even present in 2011...)

The idea that "blue bubbles" were somehow a major driver of iMessage adoption when it first debuted is rank historical revisionism to fit a narrative that isn't even all that universal today.

Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#188

Post by danaris »

hpeter wrote: post #182
mrweasel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One really weird way that you can see that is looking at Denmark, which has historically been used as a test market for telcos. SMS was practically free when iMessage was announced, not entirely, but enough people had unlimited SMS plans at that time. Denmark was the testing ground for different phones and pricing plans, better to screw up in a market with 5 million people, compared to one with 80 million. I believe…

IOS is the dominating mobile OS in Denmark, everyone I know uses iMessage. I wonder if the 0.5 cent fee on free installs will change anything, will the train ticketing app start charging a subscription fee on IOS now that they need to pay per install Apple?

That fee is only if the developer opts into the new terms. They are welcome to continue with the current App Store terms indefinitely and pay nothing per install.

Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#189

Post by rchaud »

shiroiushi wrote: post #171
happyopossum wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More importantly, most Americas do not text anyone outside of the country, and haven't really ever As a dual-citizen of Canada and the US, I'd have to say that's massively overgeneralized. Pretty much every Canadian I know regularly texts with Americans (iMessage or not), which means those Americans are texting with people outside of the Country.

No, they're not. The USA and Canada are really the same country, as far as the telcos are concerned. They're part of the same North American phone system, and have the same +1 prefix. Calls between the countries are all free, and don't carry international charges. You might think they're separate countries, and the governments may agree, but the telecom companies disagree.

> Calls between the countries are all free, and don't carry international charges.

That depends on your phone plan. The telco charges extra if you don't have a US calling plan add-on. US roaming also costs $12/day.

Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

#190

Post by rchaud »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #154
amatecha wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, actually until I finally haggled for a better plan maybe ~5 years ago, it used to cost me $0.25 to send an SMS to anyone, even in my own country (Canada)...

Canada IMO does take the crown of having the absolute worst telecoms. It’s absolutely astounding to see some of the stuff they pull sometimes. I remember being younger and wanting to unlock a phone from Rogers. They wanted $125 for this act of changing a row in a database

Regulations on that changed in 2016 or so, you can unlock a contract phone without charge through the carrier 90 days after purchase.
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