Google argues that iMessage should be regulated under the EU’s Digital Markets Act – Ars Technica

Google is hoping that regulators will rescue it from the messaging mess it has created for itself after years of rebooting the dysfunctional product. Financial Times Google and a few cellular carriers are reportedly asking the European Union to designate Apple’s iMessage as an “essential” service that requires it to be interoperable under the new Digital Markets Act. The EU’s Digital Markets Act targets “gatekeepers” at Big Tech companies of all kinds Interoperability, fairness and privacy The demands, and although iMessage did not make the initial cut of services announced in September, Apple’s messenger is subject to a “market investigation” to determine whether it should qualify.

So far, various services from Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft have been designated as “gatekeepers” because the EU says they “provide an important gateway between businesses and consumers regarding core platform services”. The list targets operating systems, app stores, advertising platforms, browsers, social networks, instant messaging, search, and video sites, and specifically excludes webmail and cloud storage services.

Gatekeeper services standards revolve around business use. The services the EU wants to include will have more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU and more than 10,000 active businesses annually in the EU, and a business turnover of at least 7.5 billion euros, or a market value of 75 billion euros, with the caveat that These are just guidelines and the EU is open to arguments in both directions. When the initial list was announced in September, the EU said iMessage had already met the regulation’s thresholds, but was excluded from the list while it listened to Apple’s arguments that it should not qualify.

Google and telcos Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Orange have sent a letter to the European Commission detailing their counter-arguments on why iMessage should be regulated. The argument is about what you’d expect, which is that “with iMessage, business users are only able to send rich messages to iOS users and must rely on traditional SMS for all other end users.” Apple’s counterargument is that it is too small to be regulated, saying: “iMessage does not constitute a significant gateway in the union for business users to reach end users due to its small size compared to other messaging services.” The company also says that “iMessage is designed and marketed for personal consumer communications” and therefore should not be subject to the business-focused Digital Markets Act.

In the EU, the dominant messaging services are Facebook products like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which is why iMessage is just on the border of regulation. It’s hard not to think that Google is trying to use the EU as a foot in the door to push Apple to open up in the US. The rest of the world is often confused by this, but in the United States, iMessage is a cultural phenomenon in some circles: pop star Drake.Texts become green“is a Billboard Top 100 song about the inner workings of iMessage. Today is amazing 87 percent of American teens have iPhones, and the Wall Street Journal wrote articles titled “Teenagers fear the green text bubbledetails the bullying children face if they don’t use Apple’s messaging platform.

Google’s response has been a “Get the Message” campaign, which nicely asks Apple to adopt a slightly better form of SMS for its green bubbles, called RCS. However, it is not clear how this will help solve bullying problems. EU regulations also mean Apple will only need to open in the EU, not the US, which is its most dominant market. Of course, Google only has itself to blame for being last in the instant messaging wars, since, by our count, it has launched no fewer than 13 messaging apps since iMessage debuted in 2011. It’s hard to build a platform when you’re constantly locking your phone to platforms .

The European Commission’s deadline for a decision on iMessage is February 2024. If iMessage qualifies, Apple would need to open the service by August.