Why doesn't the EU, oh I dunno, ASK THE PEOPLE THEY GOVERN what they want rather than taking kickbacks from Alphabet & the telcos?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Google, European Telecoms Giants Call on EU to Force Open iMessage
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The hostility in this thread is unbelievable. Standardization and consolidation is how the tech industry has operated for decades. In a mobile-first ecosystem, iMessage is as essential as email is to a desktop ecosystem. And all email providers are interchangeable. It would be a nightmare if Gmail users couldn't email Outlook users, and iCloud emails only went to other iCloud users.
https://www.apple.com/ios/business-chat/ Apple has a whole page dedicated to Business Chat in iMessage, so they are strongly encouraging businesses to use iMessage for commercial purposes. They're lying to say iMessage is only intended for personal, noncommercial use.
https://www.apple.com/ios/business-chat/ Apple has a whole page dedicated to Business Chat in iMessage, so they are strongly encouraging businesses to use iMessage for commercial purposes. They're lying to say iMessage is only intended for personal, noncommercial use.
Maybe you can't or didn't read but this is not the EU pushing this - it's the telecoms companies along with Google.
This isn't a matter of FRAND. This is platform specific solutions that have different approaches and one platform demanding the better platform open up and create an insecure system to interoperate with it's proprietary messaging protocols so that they can scrape information about Apple consumers and start target marketing them, against their own choices.
European Telecoms have no vertical solutions for expanding their business cases other than to sell user data to third party scabs who want to convince world wide products and services vendors to purchase ad space across the globe and bypass the work Apple has done to allow its users to decide how secure and spam free they want to be.
Google will lose a third of their business over time w/o such crap tactics.
Email standards have been there way before Gmail, Outlook, iCloud etc. Anyone remember Netscape? Or even AOL? 😝That is why it is one of the most insecure forms of communications as we are still reliant on tech at least from the 90s. It hasn’t been allowed to innovate and evolve much.
This is why for better or for worst we have an email “standard”. It is also easy to forget less than a decade back, different emails may or may not show up properly in your email program of choice. It was dependent on how or where your email was written. Not to mention all those plugins that made it worst. It was a big mess.
As for the standardization and consolidation argument… why hasn’t Skype, Zoom, etc. open up their video chat channels for other video chat providers? By the logic you presented, I should be able to call Zoom using my Skype account since both are geared towards “business”. It makes little sense Apple needs to open up iMessage when others in similar industries or in the same industries don’t. And this isn’t about monopoly either as Apple doesn’t have a chat/text messenger monopoly.
This is like asking the EU or any other regulating body to force Google to open up their search algorithms so that others can share the same search results because Bing or Yahoo are not providing the same results.
Last edited:
Maybe your first response to me can be started in a civil manner, not immediately an insult!
That's is what I have been saying. Collaborating and agreeing to adopt a standard is a good thing. It is done as an industry best practice. Most responding here just don't understand and make it a Google against Apple thing...
I would love to communicate with my android friends via iMessage
They force me to use whatsapp. I would love if the EU forces Apple and everybody to open up -- for selfish reasons.Your comment shows no understanding on common market laws and your reflections only emphasis that. It turns your comment bias and anti-consumer regardless of what you might tell yourself.
Thankfully, political powers does not agree with you.
if you can name one instance when a software standard lead to either maintain or improve security before becoming a standard. As another noted is email is a standard and look how awful email has been for literally decades! A standard will also probably mean here comes ads, because for example WhatsApp yesterday confirmed they are looking into including ads.
I am all for a standard if it means current levels of security is at least maintained if not improved, but i highly highly doubt that will be the case. Also just because something is standard doesn't mean it will be the end all be all. Hardware standardization is a nightmare examples include USB-C and HDMI sure you can physically plug in all the time, but look at the fine print and not every cable/connection are the same. The same will go for instance for RCS where there will be this basic protocol of RCS, but then each company will have their own protocol so what if one company has a protocol to accept certain file types, or games, or other means of communication besides text and pictures they won't work right. One protocol may be E2E encrypted, one may not be, another may have E2E along with group E2E, but because say someone in a group has a different protocol then no more E2E because they can't support it. I said this before earlier and it is not going to be some sunshine and daises thing and the whole green bubbles and blue bubbles will change to something else because of my above mentions. Yall want interoperability to send grandma photos at the cost of security and a bigger headache than currently because of all the different protocols that there will be.
Maybe read the article or even the headline before jumping in with an opinion - if you did you would see it’s not coming from the EU but from industry. You immediately turned it into an “EU is bad” which demonstrates clearly where you are coming from.
RCS wasn’t really ready for prime time, none of the carriers’ implementations were interoperable prior to Jibe. Plus, Apple (rightly) wanted to displace the carriers’ control over user experience. And Apple wanted to offer iMessage on the iPad and Mac (and to offer messaging without requiring a telephone number as an identifier). And, what’s more, Apple offered the carriers iMessage (on Apple’s terms), and the carriers rejected it. Basically, RCS was still an experiment back in 2011, and Apple had every reason to avoid it.
RCS would be a complete non-issue if Google had adults in charge and had maintained Hangouts, their one successful messaging platform. Unfortunately, though, Google was afraid of upsetting the carriers who sold cheap Android hardware, so they handicapped themselves in terms of messaging, and they’re still giving the hecklers’ veto to the carriers (who absolutely don’t want to be dumb data pipes, instead of being the best dumb data pipe they can be).
Google is your friend here..all you have to do is look for any and everything about standards and why they are essential.
Then email does have underlying standards on how the message is delivered and and the protocols used for this.
BUT it does not have a enforceable control on how that messaged is displayed in different email applications.
Then no one said anything about sending pictures of grandma in an unsecure way. That example is why we need a standard.
There can be a protocol developed by everyone that is secure and encrypted. Then it becomes THE standard! Then everyone uses it and consumers have the same user experience across all platforms and devices.
When companies go outside of the agreed upon standards and create their own standards it leads to the fragmentation we see now in messaging
Well, the problem there is Google, then. Because Google bends over backwards to curry favor with the carriers (even when it’s the second member of a duopoly, for some reason), and they’ll want to smuggle in the carriers on any sort of interoperable messaging system (just like they have with this whole RCS mess). Ditch the carriers and ditch advertising, and Apple and Google could probably work something better than base MMS out.
Google should not be the one and only example you provide about standards...that proves that software standards do not work. Going off of your underlying standard to my email comment is the standard that Apple uses in messages is the standard of SMS and that is based on the carrier. With that said...why should Apple be the target of the EU and not the telecoms for having SMS still be the standard as technically Apple is following the standard of a SMS fall back if iMessage is not available which is technically better than other messaging apps besides Google Messages which also falls back on SMS if RCS is not available. Whatsapp, Signal, FB Messenger, Snapchat, etc all requires accounts to those providers and there is no fall back as opposed to Google and Apple actually following the standard put in place by Telecoms SMS. Telecoms could easily make RCS the standard for them and make SMS the absolute fall back for cell providers but they are not and wont because guess what they don't want to assume the cost of operating their own protocol for RCS which means having to team up with like Google which if the only "Standard" becomes the Google Protocol for RCS then that isn't so standard and quite monopolistic isn't it?
Your reply never even addressed the issues that would be present with RCS and protocols and I wonder why? Is it because you are aware and acknowledge that RCS will be just as broken with the protocol mess that USB-C and HDMI suffer with where sure the underlying message and basic picture will send and receive..but xyz won't work because this person or that person is using different protocols that do not support all the features of each other...
If you really think the legislation is going to push for both interoperability/standards without a backdoor to that literal gold mine for both the government and companies you are blind.
That’s the funny thing about the EU. The President of the European Union is an unelected technocrat, yet they lecture the world about democracy. Technocracy is largely incompatible (by definition) with democracy, and most decisions of any import are largely driven by lifetime bureaucrats. Not that the US is all that much better these days, but the US still maintains older democratic forms.
Fundamentally, the idea of technocracy is that the people’s choices should be overruled by their cognitive superiors. That you can’t trust people to make the best decisions for themselves, so you have to take choice away from them. Ultimately, that even means that they can’t be allowed to vote for the politicians they want to represent them, if those politicians aren’t in line with the technocrats. (It also means that fundamental human rights like freedom of conscience can be restricted in the name of protecting people from themselves.) Fundamentally, the Soviet command economy was indistinguishable from modern technocracy, and, much like the command economy, technocracy is highly prone to developing intellectual monocultures (where one school of thought uses the power of the state to enforce its position). This means, for instance, that technocracy is prone to capture by activist schools of academic thought (such as lysenkoism in the USSR).
Last edited:
Ya, this is so stupid because if Google was so worried about “interoperability” on iOS, they could just make their own “Google Messages” app for iOS with their own standards. But instead of working for the result they want by just making their own app, they want to force Apple into changing their better system to meet them at the bottom…
I think you misunderstood here...Google is your friend to search for examples of how industry standards are essential to provide a unified user experience and how technology needs this to evolve and survive.
Fragmentation is the bane of technology.
RCS is the agreed upon standard. Apple was invited to participate in developing RCS. But chose to develop their own proprietary product. If they think this is a more efficient and better product than RCS they could open it to everyone so it could be come the new standard. that would be better for all consumers in the end and it provides a more standard unified user experience.
Look at USB C...it took legislation for Apple to add USB C to the iPhone 15. Even though USB C is faster and the industry standard.
If software standardization was so good you should be able to spit of examples just like even I mentioned with email instead of just stating basically "Google it, I swear there are". The only other one I can think of is Matter, and we still have yet to see that really take off yet.
RCS is an agreed upon standard with who? the companies just basically stating of Google will take care of it because even the Telecoms that have their own RCS protocol don't really update and support it like Google with theirs, it is also only Google really actually pushing for this RCS thing because they want you to use their protocol. It wasn't even until August this year that group E2E encryption works but wait with a caveat just wait "And now, all of your RCS conversations in Messages by Google are end-to-end encrypted, including group chats" even on their own RCS information website take a look "RCS is an industry standard for carrier messaging. This means that messaging apps that support RCS standard, like Samsung Messages, may connect to RCS chats by Google." You need Google's protocol so basically signing off on their terms and conditions (whatever all that means) for Samsung Messages to E2E Encrypt. If you are on Samsung Messages and enable RCS based on Googles own wording on their site then that does not automatically mean if you message your friend using a Pixel that you will be E2E encrypted.
Why even bring up that Apple was invited to help develop RCS, RCS may have been developed in 2007, but the first carrier to support it was T-Mobile in 2015 and it wasn't till 2016 that GSM Association deemed it a Universal profile. Meanwhile iMessage was released in 2011 so for the last 12 years all of these companies had time to implement a new standard with Google announcing their use of it in 2019. So after 8 years of Apple already using/updating/promoting why should they need to bend over backwards? Why is Google not just making/fighting for their messaging platform to be on iOS? because they know not everyone will download and use Google Messages, but guess what they want to have RCS be mandatory so that when that pop-up message comes up do you want to use Google's Protocol and you acknowledge it BINGO.
Take a look at USB-C?!? are you kidding me big deal the literal connection is the same as a cable to my toothbrush guess what I get the USB-C standard of "All USB-C cables must be able to carry a minimum of 3 A current (at 5 V, for 15 W)" yay the literal bare minimum standard of USB-C is 15W which even lightening supported anyway. It is only going to take an undermined amount of years for everyone to enjoy this whenever their time to upgrade arrives.
Yeah no. Any standard protocol will be "encrypted" unless a government wants access. When the keyholder is one of the biggest advertising companies in the world there will be no such thing as secure.
We promise we aren't reading messages just gathering tons of metadata to shove more ads down your throat.
Now instead of SPAM text messages we can get SPAM videos and pages of text hope you're on an unlimited data plan piss off the wrong spammer trying to call you and they are going to drop massive video spam.
If standards were so simple companies wouldn't have to spend millions blocking spam and using proprietary encryption to secure messages on email. If it's so easy why is email garbage?
like i said standards are essential to technology. Then Google is your friend here to search for the reasoning. If you don't understand that by the examples provided...I cannot help you.
🔎 why are standards good for technology - Google Search
www.google.com
Standards allow technology to work seamlessly and establish trust so that markets can operate smoothly. They: provide a common language to measure and evaluate performance, make interoperability of components made by different companies possible,
Why is standardization important in technology?
To achieve efficient or "seamless" integration, the standards and protocols define what rules hardware components must adhere to in order to exchange signals between applications software and operating systems at different levels in the network.
Why are standards important in computing?
Standards enable the global interoperability of technical solutions while ensuring that the technical progress can be applied smoothly on a global scale. Without international standards it would be much more difficult to interact with partners in different countries or on different continents.
The essential role of technology standards
Driving interoperability, ecosystem development, and future innovation.The essential role of technology standards
Discover the value of technology standards and how they can help your business succeed, from improving communication standards to unlocking cost-savings.
Standards are important because they enable technologies and even industries to progress faster than they would on their own. If IBM had not set the PC standard, the development of computers, hardware and software, would not have progressed as fast as it has. Even with these benefits companies are very cautious in their approach to standards. There has been much hype recently about the need to change the established standards board model to one that follows the Internet model of setting standards on the fly. This paper will argue that basic considerations in setting standards have not changed as much as people say. Although standards boards have been instrumental in many ways throughout the years, many product and industry standards are settles by market forces. The issues of standard setting in the classic example of a standards war, VHS versus Betamax, are still the same issues confronting today's standards decisions.
There literally is too many to list here so I will leave those examples for a 30 second Google search.
Then by all means look at USB C...if lightening was so good why did Apple put USB C on high end iPads? This was BEFORE being made to do so for iPhones? All this lead to was fragmentation and confusion.
Then your paragraph about RCS exemplifies the reason for a standard messaging platform across the board.
Listen I don't care if that standard is RCS or iMessage. They need to stop fragmentation and evolve to one standard.
But there are ways to hide your email address. There are ways to make yourself invisible when browsing the internet from advertisers. We give up our data for the sake of extra features and convenience.
But that has nothing to do with standards as I was describing in the context of my posts.
And they'll charge monthly to sell you a product using Apple's iMessage, that somehow Apple can't get FRAND royalties off a product THEY DESIGNED
I love you. Keep fighting the good fight.
Apple sees customers as patrons, friends, and lovers.
Google sees customers as ad clicks, a mere number.
So, Apple makes love to you for several years, has kids with you, and cries as they bury you.
Google forgets your name ten times, smacks your ass in the office, ****s you for 3 minutes and then prematurely ejaculates, gets you pregnant, runs to NC and knocks up ten other women, never sees his kids, and is constantly with a new "love of his life". He also still gets your name wrong ten years later.