Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU

Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU

The DMA’s interoperability requirement won’t apply.

The Verge

I'm sure this decision may surprise some folks in the US, but it's entirely consistent with my experience of iMessage as a European.

In the US, iMessage would appear to have damn near a stranglehold on instant message, to the point where "green bubble" is derogatory term used to describe someone who doesn't use it. As if people needed another way to exclude others.

Compare that to Europe where I honestly don't know a single person who relies on it day to day. Looking at my message inbox, I have only one message in it that uses iMessage. Everything else is SMS, and they're almost exclusively marketing messages, or systems like PagerDuty. WhatsApp is where almost all my personal messaging happens, and as far as I know, that's the experience of every european adult I've met.

The Digital Markets Act is far from perfect, but it exists to prevent large players from abusing their market position, and in the EU, when it comes to the messaging space, not only is iMessage not a monopoly, it's not even an afterthought.