Apple Being Investigated Over Their Attempts To Block Beeper

The Justice Department and the FTC are apparently deciding to investigate Apple over their attempts to block Beeper. Here’s the story from the New York Times that might be paywalled for you. But I’ll give you the TL:DR:

The Justice Department has taken interest in the case. Beeper Mini met with the department’s antitrust lawyers on Dec. 12, two people familiar with the meeting said. Eric Migicovsky, a co-founder of the app’s parent company, Beeper, declined to comment on the meeting, but the department is in the middle of a four-year-old investigation into Apple’s anticompetitive behavior.

The Federal Trade Commission said in a blog post on Thursday that it would scrutinize “dominant” players that “use privacy and security as a justification to disallow interoperability” between services. The post did not name any companies.

The battle also caught the attention of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. The committee’s leadership — Senators Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah — wrote a letter to the Justice Department expressing concern that Apple was snuffing out competition.

I’ve said this before and I will say it again. Beeper doesn’t have a right to just hack its way into iMessage just to give Android users the blue bubble experience. Conversely, Apple has every right to secure iMessage to keep Beeper out, seeing as Beeper and those who use the Beeper Mini service are unauthorized users of iMessage. Hopefully some common sense prevails here and Beeper gets shunted to the dustbin of history as this topic is really taking up way too much oxygen in the room.

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The IT Nerd

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading