As the EC considers making additional designations, Apple is pushing back against interoperability rules for its iMessage service despite the potential consumer benefits
The EC remains busy with gatekeeper investigations
Following its first designation decisions under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) on 6 September 2023, the EC has continued to assess the potential dominance of certain ‘core platform services’. It is currently investigating whether three Microsoft services (Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising) and Apple’s iMessage qualify as important gateways between businesses and consumers. Submissions from the firms contend that these services should not be subject to ex-ante rules. Decisions on the rebuttals must be made within five months, but are expected sooner – potentially as early as November.
iMessage could in theory comfortably meet the DMA thresholds
It may first appear strange that iMessage was excluded from the EC’s initial designation decisions. It comes pre-installed onto every Apple device and so could have hundreds of millions of users in Europe, suggesting that it should meet the DMA’s quantitative criteria (i.e. 45m monthly active users and 10,000 yearly active business users). While it’s plausible that iMessage may fall below these thresholds due to the popularity of other services, it also plays an important role in keeping users engaged within the iOS ecosystem, dissuading them from switching to Android. Apple has stated that iMessage is designed and marketed for personal consumer communications, and that the use of different messaging apps simultaneously reflects how easy it is to switch between them.
Apple’s reprieve from regulation may be short-lived
It could equally be argued that the use of multiple communications apps is borne out of necessity, with services not working seamlessly with each other due to ‘walled gardens’. Given one of the DMA’s key objectives is interoperability (which has broad cross-industry support), Apple’s reprieve may be only temporary. The EC is actively considering the merits of designating iMessage as a gatekeeper and has reportedly issued questionnaires to rivals and users to substantiate certain qualitative issues. The EC is seeking to gauge the relative importance of iMessage, whether there is anything specific to it that business users rely on and how it fits into the Apple ecosystem.
New interoperability rules would require Apple to adopt RCS
If iMessage is found to have gatekeeper status, Apple would have until August 2024 to make it interoperable with messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, as well as Google’s Rich Communication Services (RCS) technology. While potentially challenging technically, this could benefit consumers by reducing current frustrations with the quality of photos and videos sent between different services, and ensure encryption for texts sent from iMessage to Android devices. Google has called for Apple to bring RCS support to iMessage, although Apple cites privacy and security concerns as a major barrier to it doing so. The existence of ‘blue and green bubbles’ will therefore continue until the EC’s ruling is made. Even then, the EC might expect to face litigation from Apple, mirroring the challenges launched by Amazon and Zalando after being found in scope of the Digital Services Act (DSA).
