This sounds nice, but when you really think about the consequences it really is not.
Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer? What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better but this policy is making things harder to implement because it would be impossible to make it interoperate with other messaging apps?
I don't get why you would regulate such a thing. I get the feeling that people here enjoy seeing big tech companies "owned" by big governments without actually realising that it is actually going to make things worse, that's what regulation does in most cases.
> [...] without actually realising that it is actually going to make things worse, that's what regulation does in most cases.
Feels like a uniquely american take. Companies that are maliciously compliant are not the norm.
Leaving behind that most is an ambiguous enough term that means you could basically discredit anything I come up with, how do you feel about regulations that limit the use of harmful or toxic chemicals?
What about regulations that disallow predatory gambling, or the sale of products that do not meet their claims?
Regulations are the only tool that society has to prevent companies acting against the social good.
If you think the regulations are bad then you should genuinely consider sending updated versions to your representatives.
> Regulations are the only tool that society has to prevent companies acting against the social good.
The fallacy here is that you don't get to decide what "social good" is, especially in this case. People get to choose what is good for them, we're talking about tech products here. I see regulations in this specific case as something that goes against progress, whatever that means for the company of your favorite messaging app for the reasons I've explained above.
What about startups that will have to think about this one more thing and maybe put in twice the work when they want to validate their new product?
We're probably leaving out about thousands of other cases here, that's why I made the argument that it sounds nice but it's actually making things worse from my point of view.
The fallacy HERE is "individual preferences accurately reflect collective good."
Again, there's no clear-cut answer at any given time whether or not "this particular possibly-restrictive regulation is good for everyone." Sometimes it is, sometimes it ain't. That's what you use democracy/government for, to figure these things out.
The whole point of market economies is to let people vote with their resources. The alternative of having people vote for a representative body that regulates how they transact is far worse. Best case you get a almost as good outcome. Worst case is 49.9% of people suffer horribly under state enforced "social good".
> The whole point of market economies is to let people vote with their resources.
How do negative externalities and imperfect information figure into that? Sure, I'd love to buy Monsanto's awesome defoliant because it's cheaper than BASF's equivalent, but I may also get cancer from it in 5 years, or I may be killing pollinating insects for many miles downwind and downstream.
Do you suppose market forces could have gotten rid of lead in paint or gasoline if regulations hadn't?
> Do you suppose market forces could have gotten rid of lead in paint or gasoline if regulations hadn't?
Yes. Consider how cars have become incredibly safe over the years. Is this because the government writes good regulations? No. It is because IIHS (and the government, as well) do crash tests and publish the results. Consumers gravitate towards cars that have top safety ratings.
Ironically, the government is why leaded gasoline still exists at all.
Regulation is a useful tool when there is quantifiable harm to an involuntary third party. That is not the case here. People have an infinite amount of electronic communication tools and services from which to choose. These are all voluntary without negative externalities causing harm on individuals outside the conversation (or outside the site when relating to the cookie policy).
Network effects can be overcome locally, by talking with your contacts and getting them to move to a new app/communication mechanism. It takes time, but compelling arguments will win in the end.
I think one of the big missing pieces in your parent comment about choice and negative externalities has to do with this network effect and I do not think the argument that it can be overcome locally is a very compelling counter.
It certainly is a difficult thing to do, but we see it happen time and time again. TikTok is now the biggest app, and it was nowhere a few years ago. Same with things like Insta, What's app, Signal, etc.
It is definitely a hard thing to overcome but not impossible. Especially as people become more privacy focused. I, for example, have had zero luck moving my family to Signal, and I'm the only non iPhone in the family network with my grapheneos phone and receive constant complaints about how I mess up group threads.
Hehe some would say bad products wouldnt be sold for long but the truth is that most bad products are not gone because the market dictated it but because of regulations
;)
> Worst case is 49.9% of people suffer horribly under state enforced "social good".
As an iPhone, iPad, and iMessage user, please explain how I will "suffer horribly" from being able to interact with the iMessage service from non-Apple devices.
1) If it is prohibitively difficult (with what that means entirely defined by Apple) for them to fully support all features of iMessage to non-Apple users, and the law requires that other devices have full parity (I don't know if it does; the article is pretty short and detail-light), then Apple may have to remove features from iMessage even on Apple devices.
2) Apple may choose not to try to implement new features that they otherwise would have, for several possible reasons: similar to #1, they don't think they can feasibly implement them cross-platform; due to the extra effort of supporting multiple platforms, they no longer have the dev resources to devote to it; they think it will no longer be as profitable; etc
Sorry, but this is complete nonsense. All apple have to do is release documentation on the iMessage protocol, and allow other vendors to use this protocol to build apps that can use apple's iMessage service.
Apple obviously won't write these apps, or support those apps or the devices they run on.
Also, If Apple at a later date add features to the iMessage protocol then they document the changes & make this available and are clearly not responsible to implement or support these changes on platforms other than their own.
Apple is not being forced to do anything at all here, except stop blocking other vendors from using iMessage.
> All apple have to do is release documentation on the iMessage protocol
Do you know the specific requirements of the law, and that this would be within their terms? Because, as I stated fairly clearly, I do not know what the law requires, and was working based on one possible (fairly strict) version of what it could be.
If the law just says Apple has to open the protocol, then that certainly reduces the potential problems—but, as hellojesus points out, there may be aspects of the service that Apple is unwilling to give away because they involve trade secrets. Now, you and I may not particularly care whether Apple is able to protect every single one of its trade secrets, but I guarantee you they do, and unless the law is worded such that it requires them to give those away (again: Do you know the wording of the law? If so, please share and enlighten us!), I think that there's a very good chance that they will choose to remove functionality from iMessage rather than do so.
To be quite clear, on the whole, I think that opening up iMessage will be for the best, even being an Apple and iMessage user myself. I was simply responding to a post that was asking for potential ways in which existing iMessage users could suffer because of it.
> Apple is not being forced to do anything at all here, except stop blocking other vendors from using iMessage.
> All apple have to do is release documentation on the iMessage protocol, and allow other vendors to use this protocol to build apps that can use apple's iMessage service.
Your very argument is contradictory. The law does require Apple to do something. It requires them to reveal trade secrets and IP.
Yes. That would be the point. I don't think anyone would meaningfully argue AGAINST the idea that it is "detrimental to Apple and their interests," which is literally all this means.
That changes nothing. I can't receive unsolicited messages on my xmpp and matrix accounts until I allow the contact invitation.
At worst you could be flooded with invites but that wouldn't be much different than any one of our linkedin accounts and there could be easy mechanism to ban external servers that are reported to allow too many spammers.
I'll grant you that - but the proposed legislation isn't requiring Apple to allow iMessage users to receive unsolicited messages from external services.
It would require additional effort on Apple's part to keep third party tools' spam efforts at bay. At some point the cost of doing that isn't something Apple could justify, and at that time unsolicited messages absolutely will increase in volume.
Ah, so you have never heard of market failure, market manipulation, cartels, negative externalities, qash trading, self dealing, insider trading, wage supression agreements, and dozens of others?
You do realise that without government to keep fraud and manipulation in check 'free market' collapses into anarchy in one week?
> You do realise that without government to keep fraud and manipulation in check 'free market' collapses into anarchy in one week?
Can you provide an example of this? Or maybe point out some theory/philosophy that builds to this? I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm legitimately curious what is out there as this doesn't seem like a self-evident claim.
The whole point of market economies is to let people freely trade goods and services, but has absolutely NOTHING to do with the silly fantasy of "consumption equals governance." That's textbook nerd BS that just doesn't play out well in real life. You need direct governance, you can't expect a tool designed for one thing to do another.
> Even the biggest fan of free markets agrees government need to prevent market failures, such as natural monopolies caused by network effects.
No, the biggest fans of “free markets” do not think that, in fact, they mock both the general idea of “market failure” and the specific places where people outside their faith identify such failures:
I clicked the first link, which argues that free markets are bad because central banking has failed.
Central banking does not exist in a free market. Of course it will fail. Free markets are designed precisely to avoid the inevitable failure of a central authority.
> I clicked the first link, which argues that free markets are bad because central banking has failed.
You may have clicked on it, but I don’t see how you got that message from it. It argues that free markets are good, and that problems attributed to “market failure” are instead failures of other things (like central banking) that are not features of free markets. (All of the other pieces argue variations on the same thing; its plays a central role in the Mises Institute’s economic dogma.)
The market decides, which is a collection of signals from an amount of players that outweighs any one individual.
It is a much better method of concensus than regulation when no involuntary third party harm exists. It ensures those that have a stake are able to vote, where the size of your vote is proportional to the resources dedicated. Of course not everyone has equal voting power. Why should they when it comes to privately consumed goods and services?
Because it turns into an exploitation shit show incompatible with a stable prosperous society if we just satisfy your fetish for the perfect embodiment of abstractions like “the market.”
Well, maybe. Some fought for the same state that turned around and gave GM a whole ton of money. My boss got a couple PPP loans, and a new car. There might be some ebb and flow to the whims of those pulling the strings, but it sure looks like those who are close to them do alright.
It only targets big "platform providers" not startups. It even levels the playing field for those startups. People get so ideologically tangled that they just knee jerk.
I wish people being even that principled... I think the reactionaries in this debate are just the current generation of Apple "fanbois" who, for whatever reason, feel some need to "protect" a trillion-dollar company, or just good ol' fashioned elitism?
My pet theory is that the frothy bile in posts wanting to keep iMessage private is probably grounded in psychology/sociology: People with a quite genuine fondness for Apple's products and services, combined with their higher barriers to entry (monetary cost), forms the basis for their in-group identity, and they don't want an out-group seen as inferior (Android users, etc) from getting to join-in their, private, shared-experience. It's the same as with kids fighting over PlayStation vs Xbox.
Heh, it reminds me of when I was like that: I was a very visibly-on-the-spectrum kid who knew Photoshop, before anyone else at my school even knew what it was; when MSN Messenger 6.0 came out with support for custom user avatars/profile-pics: I thought this would lead to "normal" people learning Photoshop/digital-art and airbrushing and all getting their own Wacom tablets to make their own avatar-art and I'd lose my... special status as that one weird kid who knows Photoshop. Nah, turns out in the end everyone at school just used photos of themselves or the logos of rock bands (Radiohead's was popular) or sportswear brands. And in 2023, most people still don't know Photoshop.
So being an Apple user tends to makes someone protective of whatever they feel makes Apple... Apple. Fortunately those people aren't MEPs who get to vote on legislation with a demonstrable public benefit.
> you don't get to decide what "social good" is, especially in this case. People get to choose what is good for them
He or she doesn’t get to, but the society does. Collectively. Not individually. That’s the premise that makes the difference between “society” and a “collection of individuals”
> [..] you don't get to decide what "social good" is
Well, technically I have a say, I elect my leaders and can write to them with my opinion. Often it is the case that salesmen and charletons get into those positions but the basic premise of those positions is that they're intended to act in the social good. What you propose is that somehow tech companies will act in the social good by themselves, which I find particularly dubious.
All capitalist companies (and by that I mean, any company that is enjoying success in a capitalist society) have an often unstated goal of monopolising their market.
It is a natural outcome of competition that eventually there is a victor. The whole premise of capitalism is that competition is good, but eventually the strongest will win and you have a monopolistic leader.
The only antidote to this is regulations.
Making the argument that regulation hurts smaller companies is also something uniquely American. This regulation (and many other tech regulations) are really aimed at people abusing their position today, not some theoretical startup that somehow captures 60% of a market overnight.
FWIW, I actually really like iMessage and agree with the decision Apple made not to open it, but I can't abide talk like this because a lot of people seem to think that regulation is somehow anti-capitalist, when in reality regulation is the only thing that could keep the capitalist machine running once there is a monopoly position or a sufficient moat around a service.
Well, I respectfully disagree, I'm a firm believer that regulations disproportionately hurt smaller businesses in the long run because those giants that have the monopoly move way faster than governments and they usually have thousands of smart lawyers ready to find holes and exploit/get around regulations made, usually, by people that does not understand the subject enough.
Want to take a guess and see who does not have thousands of smart lawyers?
Just FYI: We have the Apple's example with USB-C ready to showcase this exact thing.
Regulations can disproportionately affect small businesses and still be worthwhile by virtue of preventing the thing they're regulating. For example, might be harder to start a train company with rigid safety standards but not spilling toxic chemicals over small towns is ideal.
I think USB-C's relatively flimsily implemented open standard is kind of evidence of why Apple is hesitant to things like RCS. Good luck charging a Nintendo Switch or your laptop with just a random usb-c cable you found laying around that came with who knows what. Hope you have an entire day day.
> Well, I respectfully disagree, I'm a firm believer that regulations disproportionately hurt
Yeah you made the point very clear already in all your other posts, no need to repeat it everywhere. Other point errors in your arguments like this being for 75b corps completely nullifying your core arguments, lets just say most of the forum including me, EU and indeed world doesn't share your view at all.
In fact, some healthy dose of regulations makes society actual modern society, less people dying and suffering because money-first. Speed of progress at any costs, believe it or not, is not the ultimate measure of how 'good', moral or developed society is, despite very very few getting richer quicker that way.
I did not make the case that ALL regulations must be erased to a zero, at all. I do believe that there must be a minimum of regulations that actually make everyone prosper and go along with each other. Unfortunately, regulating messaging so that anyone can have just a single app on their phone for that specific task is beyond unnecessary, but that's just my useless opinion I guess.
Regulation is also used as a euphemism for unelected bureaucrats creating policy with the force of law without real democratic input. Unless you consider the regulator retiring from government to take a seat on the board of a company he or she used to regulate or give $100k paid speeches to same a form of democracy I suppose.
I don't know if that's what it means in the EU, but operationally it's observably what it means in the USA. I will say from a distance it looks like the EU's unelected bureaucrats have even more power than the American ones do.
Your use of the term "unelected bureaucrats" as a delegitimizing pejorative is risible. Do yourself a favour and read Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.
The EU's civil servants are, by and large, an exceptionally talented bunch of people, most of whom are multilingual in addition to being experts in the fields they were hired for.
As for their having power, it's subject to democratic constraint. Maybe you should inform yourself about the process by which EU regulations are made? (No, it isn't perfect; you could start with the Trilogue Process).
We'll regulate as we see fit in the EU. Businesses that don't like it are welcome and free to go do business elsewhere.
> We'll regulate as we see fit in the EU. Businesses that don't like it are welcome and free to go do business elsewhere.
I predict that if the US foreign policy elite deems it desirable that Google operate in Europe, then Google will operate in Europe. The US based empire is happy to let the EU regulate cheese and wine, but when it comes to geopolitics they keep them on a tight leash. The Ukraine affair has shown that beyond all doubt. Hats off to the French though for rejecting permanent occupying forces under De Gaulle and never letting them back.
It's nice to pretend that GDPR somehow struck a blow against corporate overreach, but in reality it was permitted because it didn't degrade the value of Big Tech for the Intelligence Community.
Do you have any examples? Net neutrality comes to mind, but that feels a quite extreme example due to complete regulatory capture of the FCC by big telecoms.
> All capitalist companies (and by that I mean, any company that is enjoying success in a capitalist society) have an often unstated goal of monopolising their market.
That's ridiculous. There's plenty of companies that want to do what they do well and make a good profit, but have no interest in being the only player in their market.
Not just that, it's removing barriers for competition. Which is what good regulations is all about. (and, technically it more than just bubble color, it's also including everyone in group chats)
I think what the (grand)parent would argue is that this isn't removing barriers to competition, it's removing competition itself. That is, iMessage is a feature provided by Apple that makes their products more compelling as compared to their competitors. By requiring Apple to provide this feature to their competitors, they lose one of the key differentiators that make their products "better" than their competitors.
> [...] want to implement something "different" [...]
The slippery-slope argument we're seeing here is that eventually, regulations would require all products and services to be exactly the same for inter-compatibility, which in turn induces a cooling effect on any innovation or novel developments (at least for existing product verticals under regulatory capture).
You're saying Apple's iMessage is a response to competition as a feature to compete.
It is, in actuality, anti-competitive as there is no way to a competitor to participate other than creating a separate platform or App for messaging. Because iMessage comes with and is supported by both all iPhones and Apple it is an uneven playing field; it is impossible to compete & is therefore anti-competitive.
The same thing would happen with TMSC, at the moment Apple buys out a large chunk if not all of their production capacity for a node - this is fine, it's just business. If Apple said to TMSC, "we'll buy out all your capacity for this node but only if you contractually refuse to sell this node to any other company while we're using it" this is anti-competitive behaviour.
That's pretty funny considering the European Commission's original complaint against Apple was for anti-competitive behavior.
Maybe things would have turned out differently if Apple hadn't embraced, extended and extinguished SMS. Maybe regulators would be a little more lenient if the App Store was ruled with anything other than an iron fist. But now they have to take action, not because Apple is unique, but because their business practices are interfering with the progress of the rest of the industry. Competitive agency is a weak excuse when they're a noted tyrant on their own platform.
Yes, but users choose to visit sites like they choose to visit a park. They would know the risks before going.
The lawlessness described here isn't harm on a third party against their consent. It's fully known by both parties at the time of the voluntary transaction.
If your were in charge when the telephone network was designed, poor people would not even be able to make a phonecall to their middleclass neighbour or senator, they'd have to buy a special Rich People phone
Your hypothetical would make sense if iPhones didn't support regular phone calls, SMS, and every other messaging app out there. All people without iPhones can't do is send blue bubble messages to iPhone users. That's literally it.
That's a bit reductionist. Encryption, variable-sized payload attachments, reactions, dynamic group membership are some potential featurs. And - critically - integration with systems NOT tied to outdated mobile cell infrastructure (you need to procure a phone number and special systems to send an SMS).
Apple is the last real holdout here, keeping SMS and MMS alive.
Is it really only about bubble color, or also about encryption? Apple goes to great lengths to secure those blue bubbles, even as group texts. Green bubbles are not secure, and Google is pushing an interoperability standard that does not secure group chats because Google likes reading your comms for its advertising business.
I don’t think we need to identify Google’s motives as malicious. Google has been trying to get people to use its own messaging apps, but Google missed the boat, bungled the user experience, and kept confusing people with new apps.
Google would probably love it if Android shipped with a Google-branded, end-to-end encrypted messaging app that people liked to use.
I think that there is a combination of internal Google problems and problems in Google’s relationships with Android vendors that makes this difficult. And then, any such app would be probably be in, what, 6th place at this point? Meanwhile, Meta has apps #1 and #2.
> I don’t think we need to identify Google’s motives as malicious
I would argue that the evidence over the past several years has shown that the default position w.r.t. to Google's motivations should not default to 'benign' under any circumstance. With all other things being equal, and without evidence to the contrary, it makes sense to operate under the assumption that Google will enthusiastically and universally do everything they can to violate your privacy in any manner available to them, no matter how subtle.
> I would argue that the evidence over the past several years has shown that the default position w.r.t. to Google's motivations should not default to 'benign' under any circumstance.
“Not benign” and “not malicious” can both be true. Google is motivated by self-interest, is staffed by engineers which have various conflicting self-interest and ideologies, and has a culture with various competencies and dysfunctions. Sometimes Google will do things that benefit consumers and sometimes Google will do things that harm consumers, but it’s not out of altruism nor is it out of malice.
The regulation was originally an antitrust case leveled against Apple by the European Commission. It contained many things that are unrelated to saving human lives, but will make developers and users lives better in the long run. We do this because the status quo (Apple having unfettered control over their ecosystem) hasn't worked out for people outside of the ecosystem. In lieu of trusting the world's largest company to build a text-messaging replacement that works on other phones, we do have to drop the life-saving legislation to focus on nannying the next iPhone.
Developers lives, not necessarily users. It was also a huge waste of time and money for all parties as it achieves nothing - Facebook are the market leader with WhatsApp both globally an in Europe - iMessage barely registers in the top 5.
The law isn't specific to Apple, it also affects WhatsApp. Indeed in the EU that's probably much more important. Personally I don't know anybody who consciously uses iMessage, but the extreme network effects of WhatsApp make it socially impossible to move away from.
Why wouldn't it improve? Currently none of these services offer interop; in the future they might. That's a static upgrade to me, and I'd imagine most other people too.
Some in the United States would be grateful that a large multinational regulatory agency would focus on an issue whereupon green bubble people identify as blue bubble people versus matters of more import.
They would call this a win.
Not arguing against your comment. Just adding a viewpoint that some have. I.e Big government should spend more time on these kind of things instead of “life saving” things.
I am really glad to come across this comment. As another european, I am shocked at the reaction to this regulation. But then again, HN is mostly an american community.
On that note, I think the GDPR banner problem won't be solved until the UI is shown at the browser level, just like tracking permission dialogs on mobile: having the same UI for all sites would prevent tricking users into over-complicated form because at least it would be the same form everytime.
Right now, too many end users get fatigue fooled into blaming the EU rather than the companies tracking them, whereas on mobile they are aware that it's Facebook triggering the dialog, not the EU: just see how many users end up refusing Facebook tracking when they have a clear choice that doesn't push them one way or the other.
It would even help companies who currently delegate handling GDRP to thirdparty services that prey on small companies worried about being non-compliant.
That's what I was thinking, just have it as a presetting in my browser to reject all but necessary functional cookies as a header setting in requests and be done.
My understanding of GDPR, et. al. is that you don't need consent to use cookies. You need consent to use tracking cookies, third party cookies, and any cookie that isn't essential to the use of the app.
So for me, that reads as anytime I am asked about consent, it is an admission that the site is using my data/adding cookies in a way that is unnecessary and invasive. Automatically decline!
According to my Lawyers in Switzerland, this is the correct interpretation.
I'm working at removing google analytics from my product site specifically because it means I don't need a cookie consent popup any longer, despite supporting log in (which will set an actually essential, non-third-party cookie).
Respectfully, Americans can have this take because we created an environment where these companies could flourish. There is no European messaging standard for us to regulate because no European business could get to that point at all.
Respectfully, its mostly because anything that is successful in Europe is immediately purchased by the big US tech giants.
Mojang and Skype come to mind. As well as three of my former companies that are now owned by Oracle.
The EU market is definitely harder, it is not as contiguous and large as the US one, even the smallest required task: localisation, is hugely expensive.
So you can hit a critical scale faster in the US, sure, but any time anyone actually conquers Europe all that awaits them is acquisition.
> Respectfully, Americans can have this take because we created an environment where these companies could flourish
Flourish is a generous term.. There are countless examples of companies in all industries who will take full advantage of no regulations in the pursuit of profits solely.
And only when it's too late and they have caused so much chaos for people will they lobby for their own "symbolic" regulations.
There is a happy medium in there somewhere, but the US model is not it.
USA is a country with one language, one economy and 330 millions people.
When you create a company there you automatically unlock a bigger market than EU, the comparison is not fair.
Also, anecdotally, SMS was invented in europe so no need to regulate something already open and european.
> I don't get why you would regulate such a thing.
Because there's absolutely no downside to telling Apple it can't artificially make its iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices. We literally have seen leaked emails where Apple deliberately does this as an anti-consumer platform lock in play. The slippery slope hypothetical you provide is not the reality. Nobody is asking governments to regulate adding cool new features to the <Open Message Protocol> and force everyone to comply and implement them. What regulators are saying is that Apple can't deliberately make Sneetches out of us and needs to allow interoperability on their human-critical messaging platform. In the US the DMCA actually makes it explicitly legal to reverse engineer a protocol for the purpose of interoperability. This idea basically extends that to "and you can't punish users for building applications that interoperating with it" but of course is framed as "just fucking stop disallowing it greedy asshats".
If I could install a 3rd party SMS app on iPhone (like how Signal used to work on Android) I'd be more skeptical about needing this regulation.
If Apple wasn't doing this artificially and iMessage actually had features that were innovative, and that other people couldn't reasonably be expected to implement in a way that wouldn't be a detriment to the protocol, I'd be more skeptical. (TBH they've probably spent more resources on preventing interoperability than if they didn't care and let it be open...)
> Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer?
No, degrade gracefully. If the feature is an improvement for everyone and should be required, we know how to have working groups update a spec and have implementers follow (even when one leads the pack and drives the spec changes in the first place as is often the case these days). If that doesn't work build a new protocol and win people over with your obviously better CoolNewFeature.
It's like you don't believe it's possible with the countless man centuries of resources these companies have to have software both interoperate and degrade gracefully when one client doesn't support all protocol features. I don't buy it; I believe we can.
IOS 9 or 10 (been a while) turned off SMS fallback when the user upgraded to that version. People kept calling and complaining texting no longer worked, and it was just that they could only text IPhones. That was 100% a dark pattern / monopoly practice with no reason but to ensure market share.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't seem accurate. I've been using iOS since ~2015 and I don't recall ever having lost the ability to send or receive SMS messages.
I had 25 IPhones all turn off the SMS fallback on the upgrade, and found Apple documentation for such. It was an intentional act, and happened over and over.
Well, if we are going for anecdotal evidence, that hasn't happened to me even once over the past 4 iPhone upgrades. SMS as fallback is enabled by default, and it has been this way for every single device I upgraded to so far.
If you left iMessage on when you upgraded from iOS to an Android device, everyone who had an iPhone would still be attempting to send you iMessages and you'd never get them on your Android phone.
If you downgraded to an Android device without first telling iMessage that your phone number was no longer on the iMessage network, then it would fail. This is unrelated to SMS fallback on an iPhone sending iMessages.
I saw, with my own eyes, an IPhone upgrade to a new major IOS version and the SMS fallback setting turn off. The change may have been walked back, but I saw it myself, and had to fix it on dozens of phones.
I have sms fall back turned off and I can still send sms. All that check box does ask you if you want to send SMS if iMessage is unavailable instead of automatically sending SMS.
> Because there's absolutely no downside to telling Apple it can't artificially make its iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices
There are plenty. Like users thinking imessage is shit because of third party clients. Or taking away an app devs right to restrict how and where their app is used. You have no inherent right over how imessage is restricted. I mean, by what right or authority do you even get to even discuss forcing how a free(!) app is restricted or forcing an all network/server to provide services to arbitrary clients? If I block firefox on my webserver, will you or EU tell me I can't??
>Like users thinking imessage is shit because of third party clients.
If those are the concerns against forcing them to open it, they shall force them now! I mean, lol...
>Or taking away an app devs right to restrict how and where their app is used. You have no inherent right over how imessage is restricted. I mean, by what right or authority do you even get to even discuss forcing how a free(!) app is restricted or forcing an all network/server to provide services to arbitrary clients?
There are no "inherent rights" period. Right comes from law, which ideally comes from what society deems worthy to have. If EU wants open messaging than can be made into a law. It's that simple.
Whether the app is free or not is irrelevant. It's enough a consideration that it occupies a big percentage of usage share, so having it close presents a moat against communicating with a big chunk of the population (and also restricts those using iOS just one client).
>If I block firefox on my webserver, will you or EU tell me I can't??
They very well could, if the right conditions applied...
Absolutley not true. The law codifies what is already true with respect to rights but the law also fails to codify rights as with womens rights and involuntary servitude, women and black people didn't suddenly gain rights when laws were passed, they've always had those rights except the law and society failed to recognize that until some point. Law or not there are fundamental and inalienable truths from which rights and obligations can be discerned.
> If EU wants open messaging than can be made into a law. It's that simple.
Yes and if EU wants to do any number unfair or dowright evil things they can, it is that simple. What is your point, did I dispute the simplicity?
I was talking about what consumers what and what service is being offered by Apple and the inherent unfairness towards one group of consumers and favoritism towards non-american electronic makers and developers. They claim to be democratic and support equality and fairness under the law and by that claim I can contend they are in the wrong by their own standards.
Any company and consumer would naturally be treated the same if the EU is not a banana republic and as such this affects everyone.
> Whether the app is free or not is irrelevant.
It is abdolutley vital! Commerce and trade can be regulated and taxed by government authorities but a free app is not commerce. This is regulation of speech and interaction between people. If apple at least had ads in iMessage it could be commerce but it isn't. You are throwing away your rights so u can satisfy some rage against a corporation you don't have to interact with.
> It's enough a consideration that it occupies a big percentage of usage share, so having it close presents a moat against communicating with a big chunk of the population (and also restricts those using iOS just one client)
So a big chunk of the population made a choice but the government should prevent them? Very democratic! You can pass laws forcing government services and entities to not use iMessage but even the US isn't banning tiktok outright or forcing them to be compatible with something they control because... you know, of the people, for the people and all that.
> They very well could, if the right conditions applied...
Yes and that is unfair and concerning because in a free society people have liberties that allow them a choice about who they want to interact with.
>Absolutley not true. The law codifies what is already true with respect to rights but the law also fails to codify rights as with womens rights and involuntary servitude, women and black people didn't suddenly gain rights when laws were passed, they've always had those rights
Nope. They got them when those laws were passed.
You might think that they always "should have had" those rights, which is valid, but different from "always had them".
But they absoltely didn't have them, and if they attempted to exercize them as if they had them, they'd be ignored, prevented, beaten up, or worse.
>Yes and if EU wants to do any number unfair or dowright evil things they can, it is that simple. What is your point, did I dispute the simplicity?
Yes, they could. You could perhaps argue morals (based on what? Your take of what's "unfair" and "downright evil"? Because I'm a European and I don't find this law unfair at all), and that could be discussed.
But you didn't discuss morals, you wrote "by what right or authority". Well, they have the right and the authority, so?
>I was talking about what consumers what and what service is being offered by Apple and the inherent unfairness towards one group of consumers and favoritism towards non-american electronic makers and developers.
Sorry, but if you come here to sell something, you better sell it on our terms and under EU laws. If you don't want to do that, you can always opt to not sell it.
Also, you don't know what "consumers want" in general. Did you ask consumers if they want to keep Messages closed?
> But they absoltely didn't have them, and if they attempted to exercize them as if they had them, they'd be ignored, prevented, beaten up, or worse.
Our disagreement is that you think a right is something granted by the law and inability to excecise a right means you don't have it. A right simply means there is a valid justification to allow a person to do not do something. You can have a right and it can unjustly be taken from you. The government or even the fundamental rule of law exists in part to enable justice and justice exists beyond the confines of law and government. If it is just for a person to or not do something and there is a valid and reasonable explanation for that thing then it is justifiable and preventing or coercing a person to contradict that would be unjust therefore it is a right. If the law fails to codify a right then the law is unjust with that respect.
To put it differently, after a law is passed to recognize a right, people can ask for compensation for past injustices even though in the past the injustice was legal. This is because despite legality, a person had rights and due to a failure of law and society that right was not protected and damage was done.
> But you didn't discuss morals, you wrote "by what right or authority". Well, they have the right and the authority, so?
Well that is what I am challenging. The EU or governments in general don't have absolute authority over all things. In the case of EU and democratic governments there is a contract of law between the people and the government defining the authority of the government. I don't know EU law well but in the US the government has the right to regulate commerce which iMessage as a free app is excluded. In a free society, unless the government has explicit authority to regulate something it can't just restrict what you do, that's the whole point of liberty. I was genuinely asking what authority the EU had to regulate the activity of offering a free service to the public that doesn't involve hosting content, only transporting messages. This authority if legit would mean the EU can for example interfere in moderation decisions by sites like HN.
> Sorry, but if you come here to sell something, you better sell it on our terms and under EU laws. If you don't want to do that, you
But nothing is being sold, iMessage is a free app so your point is invalid.
> Also, you don't know what "consumers want" in general. Did you ask consumers if they want to keep Messages closed?
There are people who prefer a closed messaging ecosystem. For people who want a more open system there is Signal, Wire,Briar, Threema, All the Matrix clients,etc... there is no shortage of optiond and most of them are supported on the iPhone. So you and the EU don't care about open apps being available to the EU. You just want to force others to not have a closes messaging system.
I agree with your philosophical understanding of rights and law and government. I disagree that iMessage is free or that because it's free the government does have authority over it. And I disagree that you're applying your principles consistently to your argument or to the situation at hand.
First off, arguably it's very much not free because it's only available if you purchase an Apple product. The cost of operating iMessage is built into the price you pay to use Apple's services and software when purchasing their hardware. I can't go to Apple.com and freely sign up for iMessage.
Second, I can't set up a free lemonade stand on my lawn and secretly add harmful substances to the lemonade and gov't can't touch me because I didn't charge a fee. I mean come on, that's not how the government works either.
We cede a monopoly on violence to the government so they may govern all aspects of life where we believe they are needed, not just commerce. In order to protect and maintain a free society, the government must discourage and punish people that encroach on other peoples' rights universally.
If we reach consensus that as a society the mechanism we use to communicate with each other should be standardized and open so that anybody may interoperate with it, because it's in line with a free society where we believe individuals have a right to the liberty of running their own software in whatever way they see fit (much like your choice of car or clothing), then that's that and the government can step in and try to protect those rights.
>Our disagreement is that you think a right is something granted by the law and inability to excecise a right means you don't have it. A right simply means there is a valid justification to allow a person to do not do something. You can have a right and it can unjustly be taken from you.
Without a law granting/protecting your right to X, or at least the power to grant it to yourself and enforce it, you don't have a right to X.
You, at best have, a "justification for having the right to X". And even that is debatable. You might just think you have a justification, but ther people might disagree with you that X is any kind of right you oughta have.
So, where does this "valid justification" comes from? God? Some holy book? Some wise document written by founding fathers? Sorry, we don't believe in those things in these here parts. It needs to be based on either law or a body (could be "the people") that can force it into law.
> But nothing is being sold, iMessage is a free app so your point is invalid.
Doesn't matter to my argument whether its paid, or given free as a lure to keep you in the ecosystem (which is the money maker) - or even just given free in general, out of the goodness of their heart.
If a company doesn't like the terms under which a country or union of countries asks them them to sell and/or give away their app, they can always stop giving it to that country/union of countries. Easy as that.
>You're the bully here.
"Bully" against a company? For making make their app more open and compatible? That's some next level Ayn Rand shit right here...
> Some wise document written by founding fathers? Sorry, we don't believe in those things in these here parts. It needs to be based on either law or a body (could be "the people") that can force it into law.
This is actually false. Our founding fathers very much were not settled on where rights originated. Some believed, like GP do, that rights are innate and that it's the responsibility of a government to try and protect common ones. Others believed, like you, that rights need to be enumerated. One of the arguments against enumeration is that such a list could be used, as you are trying to do, as a mechanism to exclude rights not officially listed or known or conceived of at the time, which could lead to unintended oppression.
Should the government have innate power to oppress by omission? Are laws an allow list or a deny list? Does the government only get the power we the people grant it, or does it get every power we don't specifically reserve for ourselves? Neither position is absolutely correct. That's why we have courts and process. But the scales tend to tip towards the government only only being allowed power we cede to it, not the reverse.
Here's a relevant example: consider freedom of thought. Western governments generally do not explicitly codify such a concept. But we practically universally believe that human beings are afforded the the privacy of their mind. After all we're allowed to express ourselves freely and all our laws are designed to punish actions. The bill of rights was created at a time when it was impossible to know the nature of someone's thoughts, so this question was preposterous. But it's becoming possible now to capture an image of one's thoughts. If we could use that information to discriminate, it's very sane to imagine a self-serving bureaucracy would try to. So how do you establish your right to think in a society where it's innately oppressed by virtue of not being explicitly granted? See: civil disobedience.
I agree with your position but not with your rhetoric.
The whole thing is NOT about the app, it is about the provided service.
Some companies are becoming base infrastructure and so they need some regulation. What do you think if your piped water company would refuse to sell you water just because your house number ends with 8?
>Nobody is asking governments to regulate adding cool new features to the <Open Message Protocol> that participants can choose to implement or not for their users as they see fit.
Isn't that exactly what you're asking of Apple? Apple already has SMS. You want them to adopt RCS because it has cool new features that are lacking in SMS.
I don't think so. I haven't read the EU documents and the article doesn't say, but you can do this without forcing a company to adopt anything.
Let's say I propose this rule: Apple must publish the iMessage spec and allow other services to send/receive iMessages.
That doesn't force Apple or anyone else to implement any specific feature, beyond allowing others to send/receive messages. WhatsApp or Signal could decide they don't want to implement the iMessage protocol and they're free to do so. WhatsApp might support voice calling, but that doesn't force iMessage to implement voice calling. It's simply saying that third parties can choose to implement the iMessage protocol if they want.
There may be features that will only work within one platform, but that won't give anyone a lock-in advantage since others can implement those features if they're popular. For example, let's say Apple implements CoolNewFeature. They have to publish the spec for CoolNewFeature. Sure, maybe it will take 6 months for Google and WhatsApp to implement CoolNewFeature, but there's nothing preventing them from doing so. Likewise, WhatsApp already has voice calling, but you won't be able to do that with iMessage folks because Apple hasn't implemented that. That seems ok to me. If Apple starts to lose users to WhatsApp, they'll want to implement that interoperability. If it isn't an important feature, it isn't important whether they implement it or not.
To me, it seems like this is about preventing companies from creating walled gardens. It's not about forcing companies to adopt certain standards or features. Apple doesn't need to adopt RCS. If others could send/receive iMessage-protocol messages, it would provide an interoperable system. Some might complain that X protocol is better than Y protocol, but that's the history of everything. Ultimately, those types of things haven't prevented third parties from creating interoperability with less perfect protocols.
Just publishing the specs will not allow anyone to send/receive iMessages. It's built on a closed loop CA / certificate system.
Remember that Steve Jobs actually announced on-stage it would be an open protocol without actually discussing that with his engineers? The architecture is designed to be closed from the get-go, and opening up the iMessage ecosystem in it's current design is simply not possible without giving 3rd parties considerable access to Apple internals, affecting a ton of stuff beyond iMessage, and pose serious security risks.
Could Apple re-design a messaging system which would allow this and roll it out transparently to all it's users? Absolutely, but that would require a ton of engineering work, and won't be there tomorrow.
You're forcing Apple to carry/send/receive messages for their direct competitors. Apple obviously subsidizes the cost of iMessage currently from their iPhone sales. A workaround could be charging users a monthly rate to connect to their servers I suppose. But that seems like it would maybe defeat the point a little?
You can send iMessage an sms, that is letting other companies interoperate with it, no? That sounds like WhatsApp is choosing not to implement a way to send a message to iMessage.
But you can't be blue and send iMessage an iMessage with all the nice modern messaging features. Have you ever had a group SMS where some people are iMessage and some aren't? It's unnecessarily jarring and I know that WhatsApp and Google/Android etc. would support "likes" and "loves" and "exclamations" if they could. I'm 100% certain they know exactly the right message format and data structures to use too. It's Apple that won't let rich texts be displayed as such from anyone who's not an iMessage user, by design.
> It's like you don't believe it's possible with the countless man years of resources these companies have to have software both interoperate and degrade gracefully when one client doesn't support all protocol features. I don't buy it, I believe we can.
Every instance of that is a huge guesswork mess that I wouldn't wish upon average people to navigate though. RCS has tons of "maybe implement" features, and don't even get me started on the mess that's XMPP. If you ever tried to use OMEMO from two different clients at once, you know what I'm talking about.
> and don't even get me started on the mess that's XMPP.
If two clients have good implementation, there is nothing messy about user experience. The only problem is that most clients are developed by hobbyists in their spare time, who might have very different ideas on how to do key verification, etc, so you get only what you get. It is not because of the protocol.
> By the way, iMessage is XMPP. Whatsapp is XMPP. Just artificially closed. Long etc.
I've heard these rumors, but they don't seem to be true. WhatsApp seems to have moved on a long time ago (to a binary format wrapped in an implementation of the noise protocol framework) and I find zero indication iMessage was ever XMPP.
But that's besides the point. XMPP is great for a uniform ecosystem (in fact, a lot of XEPs are some company standardizing their use-case), but awful if you allow federation and third party clients.
> Because there's absolutely no downside to telling Apple it can't artificially make its iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices.
I would assume one downside is a higher amount of spam. Currently you need to have an Apple device to send an iMessage. So sending spam is an expensive proposition.
Spam operations have so much money that buying a bunch of iPhones is not an issue, even if they didn't, they could buy older, used iPhones for pennies.
The bigger headache is the iCloud account required to send iMessages. A pain to set up, and after a few spam messages Apple will just terminate the account. And probably blacklist the phone used to do it. Sure, this isn't terribly expensive, but compared to the barrier of entry to SMS (zero), it is pretty substantial.
I'll add some anechdata: I get frequent text spam (about 1/day at the peak, it's slowed a lot recently). I've gotten maybe 5 spam iMessage messages during the entire lifetime of my phone.
I've never understood the origins of this argument. I'm pretty sure it's rooted in deep misunderstanding.
If I want to spam you I buy a bunch of numbers on Plivo and start sending your number messages with SMS, the existing standard. They show up in iMessage on your phone. The only difference is they're green instead of blue.
So, how do I need an iPhone to send you spam? iMessage doesn't do anything related to spam other than let you delete and report it.
But if it did work that way, then the standard could include that messages need to be signed with a device attestation key from an approved vendor or something like that. There could be a way to have your attestation keys registered like we do for CAs today so that your attestation hardware could be used. Phone manufacturers would all implement device attestation, like Apple and Google do.
Please note I’m responding to the claim that there is “absolutely no downside” to making Apple devices more interoperable. I’m not saying whether or not that is a good enough reason not to.
I know the difference between SMS and iMessage. Currently I get plenty of SMS spam. I get pretty much zero iMessage spam. I’m pretty sure that I would get more spam if iMessage was made interoperable, even if device attestation was implemented as you described. Some Googling suggests that RCS, the competing standard for messaging, does not implement device attestation.
> Please note I’m responding to the claim that there is “absolutely no downside” to making Apple devices more interoperable. I’m not saying whether or not that is a good enough reason not to.
Right, I'm just genuinely confused. How would you meaningfully distinguish between the spam? Why would there be more of it? Wouldn't it just come in blue instead of green? I'm not sure I understand how adding a 2nd avenue for spammers opens new doors when the existing avenue is totally sufficient. Perhaps if you could send messages from an email only account is what you're saying? Personally I would hope there'd be ways to control unsolicited messages in the messaging apps and report spam to the carriers. And honestly I was thinking that as an sms replacement, messages from email-only accounts would be something different carriers would want to gate/control onto the network as they see fit. Or more ideally the protocol itself could require messages to be signed with device attestation keys. Why iMessage doesn't give me better spam management options for existing SMS is the real question.
In the Messages app on iOS, how the message was sent is clearly marked. At the the top of the conversation window, above the chat bubbles, it will say “Text Message” or “iMessage”. This line will also appear between chat bubbles whenever the current thread changes how messages are being sent.
But I think I see the miscommunication. I’m assuming that iMessage gains interoperability and thus there are more people who could potentially send spam. But I think you are arguing that SMS would be replaced with the more advanced, interoperable protocol. In that case, I understand your arguments why there would be the same amount or less spam.
> It's like you don't believe it's possible with the countless man centuries of resources these companies have to have software both interoperate and degrade gracefully when one client doesn't support all protocol features. I don't buy it; I believe we can.
Did you ever look into what happened with XMPP extensions?
Yeah Google killed XMPP because they just had to have a better proprietary protocol and now look where that got us... nowhere. To your point though, I believe Apple and Google 100% staffed and capable of implementing robust support for extensions. The problem with this historically is that it's one off devs and hobbyist projects that have tried to support this stuff. I don't think it's fair to draw conclusions from that. Look at the web and Chrome and what Google can do when they actually put their weight behind something (imagine if they had done for XMPP). Look at Apple and Google and WebAuthN. WebAuthN has optional extensions. It's completely do-able.
Essentially, think of all the amazing grassroots OSRS clients we'd have that wouldn't have been C&D'd over the years if it was illegal to punish users for writing interoperable software...
> Because there's absolutely no downside to telling Apple it can't artificially make its iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices.
I am looking forward to Google being able to finally get ahold of my iMessage and hoover it into their surveillance capitalism machine. What a huge benefit to me!
Incorrect. If multiple services interoperate with each other, that does not mean that one service can vacuum up the entire data on that network. As an analogy, Gmail servers cannot touch emails that are stored on Outlook and have never been addressed to a Gmail recipient. And if your position is that Google gets access to traffic flowing on a heterogeneous group of iOS and Android users simply because of RCS, that is again incorrect. RCS does not enable any new insidious capabilities that Google may not already have by the virtue of building Android.
RCS will have no effect on iMessage whatsoever. Messages between a homogeneous group of iOS users has no reason to touch Google owned (or other) RCS servers. And for Android users, RCS is a meaningful upgrade from traditional SMS.
>Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer? What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp...
Okay, this is where I think we need to make clear who this requirement applies to. If we click through the first link, found in the first sentence in the article, to the actual source text[0] and run it through Google Translate, we can find that this requirement only applies to companies...
>... whose market capitalization reaches at least 75 billion euros or whose annual turnover exceeds 7.5 billion euros. To qualify as gatekeepers, these companies must also provide certain services such as browsers, messaging or social media which have at least 45 million end users per month in the EU and 10,000 business users per year.
The point for the legislation is to force market leaders to open up and enable competitors, today and tomorrow. Calling them out by name works fine for today, but won't apply to the next TikTok/Instagram/WhatsApp/etc.
Calling those companies by name would be extra stupid. Let's say out of nowhere there's a new company that fits to all the criteria but it's not called by name? The law would have to be changed to add their name to the law. It's wasting a lot of time. Instead of that there's a list of criteria and company is automatically on this "list".
well this is the way legislation works, it's considered bad form to call them out by name so you choose some few characteristics that apply to them which has the side benefit that if in the future some other company comes along with those characteristics the same laws apply to them.
It would only be a bill of attainder if it used arbitrary characteristics not relevant to the stated purpose of the bill to target specific companies. The definition cited is not arbitrary in that sense - it targets large companies in specific markets, and there's an obvious rational connection with the stated purpose.
I believe that both comment are trying to say that:
- Google and Apple must do X => unconstitutional
- All Companies bigger than X with chat-like apps and an app store and a near-oligopoly OS must do X => probably constitutional
- All Companies such that (proceed to list dozen of random characteristics meant to only ever apply to Google and Apple ) must do X => probably unconstitutional
I can't wait to forever jump from app to app because as soon as one company exceeds 7.5 billion euros, it'll get struck by this new set of laws that makes its entire business model impossible. Of course, that's assuming that the EU doesn't expand this when they notice that happening...
I've heard the same when the US forced MS to allow different browsers as default, when the EU mandated a common charging port for mobiles and again when they mandated USB-C. I've yet to see the groundbreaking innovation that I am missing in the smartphone charging area that was suppressed by EU regulation.
This again is a talked up hypothetical problem at best. We've had chat for 30y now and while progress has been disruptive in the beginning, things have considerably consolidated.
I don't quite get what's so great about having to install 5 different chat clients just because your social network is too varied to force them onto one.
It's a case of corporate greed where sensible solutions (like licensing out the protocol) are not done to damage the opponent. I don't profit from this - if companies hadn't been this evil, the EU wouldn't have come down on them. If they don't like it, they can just stop selling smartphones in Europe.
> What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better but this policy is making things harder to implement because it would be impossible to make it interoperate with other messaging apps?
That's still possible. The company owning that platform just has to ensure that its services are accessible by any client. Protocols/APIs can still be further developed or brand new ones introduced. But they still have to be documented & be made accessible.
>it is actually going to make things worse, that's what regulation does in most cases.
Yes all those regulations that actually make things worse.
Which ones are those again? specifically?
I find that generally people who make hand-wavey boogeyman 'regulation is bad' arguments typically struggle to identify which regulations are bad and why, and conveniently forget about the thousands of regulations that make their life livable every day.
I agree with your criticism of the companies who time and time again decide to utterly destroy their user experience just so that they can spy on people. They should avoid that.
It made browsing the web an inferior experience for all users. Come on. Let’s not continue this charade and just accept a valid argument when you see one
I agree. These companies are making the web a worse experience for all users. I wish they would stop.
At the very least I get the option to not be tracked on those shitty websites, but I would really, really have preferred if they didn't make me go through all those intentionally confusing and probably illegal steps to opt out of tracking.
Did providing a pop up on every website you visit saying they use cookies enable your ability to use the accept no cookies feature browsers have had since Netscape navigator? Was a regulation required to enable a feature of all browsers since the dawn of graphical browsers? Or are you saying the regulation allows you to remember that literally every website in existence uses cookies since you forget between websites?
I’m trying to figure out in what way this has made anything better, safer, or whatever? By the way, cookies is like the 1996 way of tracking and those opt outs don’t opt you out of tracking.
So, yeah. Super giant win for regulations there - clicking away useless disclaimers en masse to satisfy some EU bureaucrats poor understanding of technology. I’m sure they got a great post out of it. It’s like the pop up ad that you are required to pop up on every website but no one benefits, not even the website owner. At least a real ad the website owner makes some money.
I don't want to disable cookies. I want to be able to log in to things, and I'm not happier if the site uses localstorage instead of cookies to track me.
The GDPR doesn't forbid using cookies, by the way. If cookies are used to remember that you logged in using a session cookie, or remember the state of a shopping cart, or stuff like that, no warning is necessary. It's a law which requires consent to tracking, not consent to cookies.
You complain about lawmakers' poor understanding of technology, but I don't think your understanding of law is any better if you think that "every website is forced to show a pop-up". They choose to show a pop-up because they're forced to get consent if they want to track you.
GDPR doesn’t say anything really about cookies, actually. I think you meant ePrivacy.
Fact is most popups inform you about cookie use but don’t give you an option to do jack. And what makes you believe they’re ePrivacy compliant? I’ll bet you 90% of those sites, even when well intentioned, pollute you with tracking cookies anyways.
Edit: by the way no modern website uses cookies to maintain your shopping cart, and instead of relying on a persistent credential cookie, you could just use a password manager to expedite login and be more secure overall. Finally, “private” mode on most browsers contains cookies to short lived session cookies within the tab lifespan.
> GDPR doesn’t say anything really about cookies, actually. I think you meant ePrivacy.
I meant GDPR. It's the reason why websites have to get consent if they want to track you. I believe you're right that it doesn't mention cookies though, I don't believe it cares about what technology is used for tracking.
> Edit: by the way no modern website uses cookies to maintain your shopping cart, and instead of relying on a persistent credential cookie
That's what I meant. You store some unique ID on the client in a cookie, then you have a shopping cart database on the back-end. I didn't mean to imply that the cart items are stored in the cookie, just to distinguish the persistent shopping cart use-case from the logging in to a user account use-case.
> you could just use a password manager to expedite login and be more secure overall.
I do this. I still want to be logged in for a while.
> Finally, “private” mode on most browsers contains cookies to short lived session cookies within the tab lifespan.
I know. Would you find it very convenient if your browser always acted as if you were in private mode and didn't keep you logged in for longer than the lifespan of the tab? No? Neither would I.
No, you’re wrong. It’s ePrivacy. GDPR set the framework, ePrivaxy has largely superseded.
Actually, I do use privacy mode at all times. The only hindrance is the need to recredential. I have a password manager that auto fills those forms in. It works great, and is better security overall. My cookies database shouldn’t be equivalent to a password file, and I don’t carry around a pile of spammy cookies handing them out to every invasive spy company, hoping an obnoxious pop up mandated by an ineffective regulation will shield me. I use computer science, which always works, rather than political science, which is just a degree for folks who like to drink too much.
You always have the option to turn off cookies. There is literally 0 check you have as a user to ensure a company isn't nefariously using cookies despite your preferences. All the law did was force trash pop-ups everywhere.
I don't want to turn off cookies, I want to be able to log in to things. And the cookie technology isn't the problem, tracking is; if the tracking happens locally using localstorage instead of cookies, I haven't gained anything.
The law didn't force pop-ups anywhere. Some companies chose to put pop-ups on their websites.
I have to admit this is a clever response but it's also an example of a meaningful regulation that corporations are trying to work around. They are annoying on purpose. The law doesn't say to make an annoying popup, only that you can't do user hostile things with cookies.
But surely everyone knows that companies will absolutely comply in the most minimal way possible to any regulation and will actively seek loopholes. Their incentive is profit, not egalitarian utopia. We may wish the universe were different, but it’s not. It’s like wishing the sun won’t expand and consume the planet some day out of respect for life.
Or you could have turned off cookies entirely or per site in your browser since 1996, and not depend on the goodwill and compliance of an advertising company. But as has been demonstrated there are a bazillion ways to track you even with cookies blocked that you have no control over nor are covered by this spam pop up inducing bit of transnational bureaucracy.
The ones that created cookie popups everywhere. It’s horrible. It’s the worst. Everyone can see how horrible it is. Nobody understands why this is still a thing.
Companies who decided to continue their invasive policies chose to implement those popups to provide legal cover. Non-invasive companies don't need to do that. The issue is with the companies, not the regulation.
The issue is with both. It is not exactly surprising that for-profit companies implement the regulation in a way that minimizes their expenses, and the outcome this produces could have been anticipated when the legislation was written. The outcome matters more than the intent.
You come up with some unknown theoretical magical features which will suddenly make it impossible to implement due to this ruling. That's not what this is about, and I think everybody on this forum understands a bit too well the current situation on the market, and the reason for this ruling.
I couldn't care less if Apple is 'owned' or not, its nothing special to me compared to all other corporations. Having at least a bit compatible messengers is definitely something positive, its quite a mental gymnastics to immediately try to come up with some theoretical reasons why this shouldn't happen at all (and failing at that). If apple didn't do typical apple thing to create its own standards and share it with nobody, they wouldn't be hammered by regulators 15 years down the line (lightning port, now this, we will see what comes next, plenty of topics to pick up).
Apple knew very well this will eventually come, same for USB, but they made it into operational cost of having some sort of advantage to get more income till its stopped. Now correction happens. You regulate such thing because clearly corporations only care about profits. And markets, as wonderful as they are, always put money on the first place so waiting for them to move corps into more considering-society territory is often a fruitless effort unless you have gigatons of patience.
The job of most government officials is to find plausible solutions to real problems, get a mob engaged and mobilized to solve it, then get the money voted into play so they can extract it via kickbacks and other indirect payments from the contractors.
They're gonna be trying to regulate anything they think is capable of justifying the racket.
Example: Youtube.com 17million dollars running for 18 months, healthcare.gov, 2 billion dollars failed on launch and not used at all.
Healthcare.gov was famously a boondoggle, and did have to be rebuilt. But comparing a notorious failure to a generational success is a bit disingenuous. To say that no one uses healthcare.gov is also a bit disingenuous. It set a record for signups in 2022 at 16 million plans sold.
For a different comparison, why don't we look at Uber: it has market dominance to the point of being a verb, yet it loses more money per year than Healthcare.gov has cost in its entire existence.
Also, worth noting is that dozens of states managed the Obamacare site rollouts just fine as an example of government managing tech projects just fine.
Maybe not regulate. Maybe just don't prevent adversarial interoperability from happening. In an ideal world, a company trying to sue someone who built an unofficial client for their service should be laughed out of the court building and fined for wasting judge's time.
Remember ICQ? The official clients were bloated and generally meh. Many people didn't ever see them, not even once. Almost everyone I knew used QIP, Miranda, Adium, or something else third-party. ICQ the company sometimes broke the protocol and then there was a massive uproar. Then clients got updated and everyone carried on messaging. But the system being involuntarily open like this meant that there were ICQ clients for so many things that wouldn't ever get official treatment otherwise. Basically — if it has a network interface, a screen, a means of text input, and can run arbitrary code, it'd have an ICQ client built for it at some point. There was one in the form of an ELF binary for Siemens phones for example.
No one is asking for a standardized protocol. It is my understanding that what is being asked for here is the documentation of their existing protocol that would allow third-party clients and bridges to be built. And this is an unequivocally good thing.
> "Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer?"
No, I don't think so. You can set a standard that defines a baseline of features that all interoperable messaging apps must support. But that doesn't preclude apps from offering additional functionality over and above the standard.
I don't even think they have to do that. I think the law will just mean that they have to allow other apps to implement their protocol, not forcing them to follow a specific standard. Like, they can still use iMessage and add new features, as long as there's some way for third party apps to use it as well.
What sort of features would prevent a client from receiving a text-based message? XMPP used to work across platforms but commercial interests killed it. Surely, messaging clients can publish a protocol and provide a reference library for others to use to directly contact users on their platforms?
Well looking at Apple's more recent features for iMessage, Animoji and Memoji related features are presumably non-trivial to slap into an existing app.
> What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better
This is never how it was supposed to be. The internet was the massive success it is because it is built on open standards.
Back in the day, if anyone wanted to build a better protocol at something, you had open discussions and eventually come up with an RFC that anyone and everyone can implement and be interoperable.
While it's difficult to shove that genie back into the bottle, anything that in any way promotes interoperable standards above these terrible proprietary walled gardens is a huge win.
Seriously, there's no serious argument that suggests that this is the likelihood. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes it doesn't. The problem is, no one notices the good stuff due to regulation because you're just used to it.
Frankly, it's getting irritating that people aren't understanding this more?
Why is a citation needed for something that's logically obvious? Why do we need to provide links to an "expert" telling us 3+3=6 when we can just use a calculator?
Because you are getting the basics of economics wrong.
You have spent many years of schooling learning to count.
Have you studied economics for at least 1 year of formal education? Have you read a book by a real economist?
Read 'Economics, the user's guide'. This is not how they think, this is not how they argue.
What we have here, is a person who hasnt learnt math arguing that 3 + 3 = 7 and claiming it's logically obvious.
Or like a medieval scientist arguing that Spontaneous Generation (Mice spawn in straw by themselves) is a law of physics and it's logically obvious.
I have an undergrad degree in economics from Harvard University. Gotta say it makes me pretty well equipped to poke at how BS it often is.
edit: this is me idiotically angrily responding incorrectly to the wrong person. leaving it for the message "don't trust these clowns with fancy degrees, they often are clueless" :)
I really love it when people "flex" their training by converting every question in life into something in their domain and then shouting at everyone who argues with them. Love it.
Economists are often the worst, because almost everything involves money, so you can just pretend that every problem is an economics problem.
I think it's more it's an SMS replacement or extension, which is supposed to be an open protocol, and they're not opening up the API to support the additional extended features (which is something out of Balmer/Gates era embrace and extend playbook, "we'll extend JavaScript, but you'll need IE to use any websites using the extended features and the site features will be broken without it" which is an anti-competitive practice that breaks what are supposed to be open platform independent protocols). Do something new, sure, extend features of an open protocol, sure, but if you're going to communicate with other Messaging platforms as a feature, you need to allow other messaging platforms the option to support those features on their end as well. Such as encryption, the ability to add emojis to a comment, full size attachments, etc.
Signal is actually removing SMS support, so problem solved on that end. But Signal can be installed on most platforms anyway, so if someone wanted to participate in the extra features, they always had the option of simply installing the client app. I can't install iMessage for Android if I want to be in the family group message and not see "Mom liked an image" 15 times. I personally dislike iPhones, but I still want to participate in my family's group chat, Apple doesn't give me that option. At least with WhatsApp, Signal or whatever what phone we have doesn't matter and we don't have to join the walled garden to use really basic features. I don't know what phone my friends in Signal group chats or WhatsApp use, because it doesn't matter.
If you're going to bridge different platforms, allow the other platforms to update to support it. It is exclusionary. Apple does this with FaceTime, I have my family install Duo/Meet on their Apple phones because I have to explain to them I don't have an Apple device for it, or if I do, its my work machine. At least that's a little less hostile than, "you can chat with your family but you're going to see activity you can't participate in".
> Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer? What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better but this policy is making things harder to implement because it would be impossible to make it interoperate with other messaging apps?
Just open the standard/api/protocol, document it, and it'll get integrated into pidgin or some other alternative within a few days. Currently it's not a problem of not having apps trying to integrate protocols, but protocol designers intentionally locking other apps out of the ecosystem.
But also, you generally want to iterate faster than "write a new spec and wait 2 years for implementations to support half of it". The alternative to which is just implementing it and hoping the other party can somehow make sense of it. Emoji reactions being supported by only a few activitypub implementations is an example of it.
This is incidentally the reason moxie cited for not making Signal federated.
Why "hoping"? Just bake the ability to advertise and query for capabilities into the protocol. This is an issue that has been solved many times before.
And yes, it might mean that only one client would support a shiny new feature for a while. But that's exactly the situation with iMessage, s/for a while/forever/.
Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp aren't baked into the devices people buy, though. I don't know if that is a valid distinction in terms of the EU's thinking, but it's one I would be perfectly happy with.
> people here enjoy seeing big tech companies "owned" by big governments
Absolutely. These corporations laugh all the way to the bank as they destroy our privacy and exploit us for profit with surveillance capitalism, destroy our computer freedoms with hardware cryptography only they have the keys for, pollute our web with unending advertising and annoyances driven by "engagement engineering". Someone really ought to check their goddamn audacity. My only complaint is the fines aren't big and frequent enough to surpass their cost of doing business.
I'm sorry, I just don't feel sorry at all about the trillion dollar corporations. Maybe they should try not being monopolists who want to own the platform and their users. Then maybe the state won't feel the need to remind them we are not cattle to be sold to the highest bidder.
Tell that to its threats to do client side scanning on what's supposed to be our devices. The fact they can even get away with even suggesting such crap points to the fact their crimes are a lot worse and more fundamental than privacy violations: they destroyed our fundamental computer freedoms by denying us the capability to run or not run whatever software we want. Under Apple and its peers, we are oppressed at a fundamental level by being forced to accept whatever bullshit whims a corporation decides to impose upon us with a software update. They have the keys to the machine, they determine what code it runs and doesn't run.
> The others, this law is trying to force interaction with, not just did, but actively and aggressively do.
They are not excused either. They should be sanctioned even harder until they cease and desist all exploitative behavior.
What's there to do 'differently' about a chat client? They haven't changed in the last 30 years or so. "Special features" could still be implemented by non-standard protocol extensions while still being able to exchange bare bones messages with all clients which accept the standard protocol.
Telegram recently implemented some new features, and I was too lazy to update the client. It showed "you need a recent version of Telegram to see this" message instead of new functional. I don't see how other messengers won't do exactly that for unsupported types of content.
I imagine they'd setup a basic protocol for interoperability of simple messages and then each client can build anything they want on top? Similar to other protocols. At least that's what I am hoping for
The problem is that SMS is nowadays a poor fallback, lacking support for a number of widespread features that are part of the EU's required baseline for interoperability.
The DMA requires interoperability without a decrease in security - this explicitly includes end-to-end encryption, which iMessage supports. Since SMS has no standard for key distribution/discovery, it already fails at that hurdle.
It also requires that features such as group messaging and audio/video calling.
So, let me get this straight -- the EU is now requiring end to end encryption? Haven't they been harping this whole time on how that enables child predators?
Just like with the deliberate sabotaging of non-certified (read: cheap) USB cables to make them slower, HN posters never fail to defend Apple at every opportunity.
There should be a browser plug-in that makes ChatGPT check whether your comment is against HN guidelines, upholds standards for a good discussion, and whether the argument is sound or not.
Issue is ChatGPT is too politically biased for many discussions unfortunately.
Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer? What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better but this policy is making things harder to implement because it would be impossible to make it interoperate with other messaging apps?
I don't get why you would regulate such a thing. I get the feeling that people here enjoy seeing big tech companies "owned" by big governments without actually realising that it is actually going to make things worse, that's what regulation does in most cases.