This week, theEC concluded investigationsinto what it calls “gatekeepers” for internet services.
These services have so many users that they are similar to monopolies andshould be subject to more government regulation.
But Apple escaped, mostly because pretty much nobody in the EU uses iMessage.
iPhone With Messaging Apps.Adem AY / Unsplash
DMA Smackdown
Europe’sDigital Markets Act(DMA) is causingall kinds of trouble for big tech companies.
), and it has fired the first salvos againstApple’s massively locked-down iOS App Store.
Butwith messaging apps, things are more complex.
WhatsApp.Christian Wiediger / Unsplash
For a start, do they even need to be interoperable?
After all, it’s easy to have a few different messaging apps on your phone.
How is that different, really, from having different tabs in one messaging app?
Messaging on a Smartphone.Yura Fresh / Unsplash
How do you make rival messaging services, with their own secure encryption methods, talk to each other?
Would it really want to just become another tab in the dominant WhatsApp app?
And that’s the big catchthe smaller messaging companies, like Signal and Apple(!
), don’t have to open themselves up to anything.
WhatsApp, Fellow Kids?
The big irony here is that Apple could actually benefit from opening up iMessage.
In Europe, iMessage is a distant straggler in the messaging race.Most people use WhatsApp for everything.
Now people use it for groups, for business, for phone calls, everything.
If Apple were to incorporate WhatsApp support, it might actually make iMessage more popular.
But then, it would have to compete on features, and WhatsApp is just a better app.
There’s one glimmer.
But in the meantime, for users, very little will change.
